Samsung has unveiled a new Bixby Developer Studio to make its assistant open. But Samsung’s vision of the future isn’t exciting.
Samsung really wants to evolve Bixby from a simple voice assistant to a scalable AI platform, and it just launched an initiative to help make that a reality: a new developer kit.
Unfortunately, the company did so in the least exciting way possible. This included showing how to book reservations on Mars with an oxygen bar. And a guy — Viv Labs CTO Adam Cheyer — wearing masking tape as a tie for some reason. Credit: Samsung At Samsung’s annual Developer Conference, Eui-Suk Chung, executive vice president and head of software and artificial intelligence, started by stressing that Samsung is deeply committed to AI Part of this effort is re-imagining Bixby with a new three-pronged strategy.
Dag Kittlaus, CEO of Viv Labs, tried to make a case for Bixby as well. (Samsung acquired Viv labs in 2016, and Kittlaus helped create Siri). He argued that it’s still early days for voice assistants, reminding the crowd that there were 12 other search engines when Google launched.
MORE: Best Smartphones — Here Are the 10 Best Phones Available
«Partners and brands that get in early are going to have a huge advantage,» said Kittlaus. Credit: Samsung then showcased Bixby Developer Studio, an application that can be downloaded for Windows or Mac. In the studio you can create what’s called capsules, which are basically AI-powered actions. And the tool seems fairly intuitive
What was lacking from Samsung’s presentation was the polish and excitement that Apple and Google have delivered at their conferences, WWDC and Google I/O. It didn’t paint a great picture of what Bixby will be able to do or showcase a real-world example with a developer who maybe had early access to the studio.
So, Bixby could very well catch up to the likes of Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa, but Samsung’s Developer Conference didn’t paint a very thrilling picture of that future.
