Siri, almost the first Virtual Assistant for a smartphone was introduced by Apple and soon enough, Microsoft adopted that with their introduction with Cortana and then came Google Assistant for Android. Now, its Samsung’s turn to heat up the game!
Bixby, which long been rumored, is the company’s very own personal assistant (or “agent” as they seem keen on calling it) that’ll be at the heart of all their products. Samsung has confirmed that Bixby will launch with the Galaxy S8, and that those phones will even have a dedicated Bixby Button to initiate the personal assistant.
Samsung hasn’t yet fully revealed details about its assistant and all its capabilities, but they did give us an idea of how deep it will be in its ability to help you in your day-to-day. Samsung’s big goal for Bixby is to eliminate user confusion by eliminating the pitfalls that plague most voice-activated assistants, such as having to issue exact phrases to get the result you want, or not being able to use the assistant for all functions of an app.
To that end, Samsung says the assistant will have the power to allow you to use voice to do almost anything you could do in an app with touch, and you can weave in and out of voice and touch mode whenever you feel like. They say you can issue incomplete commands to Bixby and it will attempt to understand what you want to do and help you from there.
It sounds great on paper, but we won’t be able to see just how powerful it is until we see it in action. Samsung says they’ll have several apps ready to go with Bixby integration at launch, Samsung Pay likely being one of them as previous leaks have suggested. The company will also release a third-party SDK for developers who want their apps to be enhanced by Bixby.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus will be fully unveiled March 29th, and you can bet the Virtual Assistant will be one of our biggest interests when we start picking the thing apart. Stay tuned.
