Could artificial intelligence make devices easier to use? According to Samsung, it sure can, and that’s what it the company out to prove with its Bixby AI service.
Could artificial intelligence make devices easier to use? According to Samsung, it sure can, and that’s what it the company out to prove with its Bixby AI service.
Bixby is being loaded on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones, which were announced on Tuesday. Bixby is an agent that can help the smartphones talk, recommend, and remind, said Mok Oh, vice president of service strategy at Samsung.
The AI service is being positioned as a more intuitive way to use and interact with smartphones. For example, Bixby can help smartphones execute tasks with a voice command. It also brings cool features like image recognition and language translation on board the S8 smartphones.
Bixby isn’t intended to be a service like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Apple’s Siri, though it does have some of their features. It’s also not a replacement for S Voice, which won’t be present on S8 and S8+ but will live on in Tizen devices.
Samsung plans to “Bixby-enable” other devices, such as appliances made by the company, though it is unclear when that will happen, said Werner Goertz, research director at Gartner.
There is a dedicated Bixby button on the smartphones. Samsung didn’t provide a chance to test Bixby and didn’t say when the AI service would come on the new smartphones. It could be available on the smartphones as early as April 21, when the S8 handsets ship, or be pushed out in a software update. Samsung has said the service will mature over time.
Once you long-press the Bixby button, here’s what the S8 handsets should be able to do.
