Samsung unveils its Virtual Assistant - Bixby

Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are known for its artificial intelligence powered personal assistant and now you can add ‘Samsung’ into the mix. The South Korean tech company has announced on Monday that it is developing a voice-powered digital assistant named ‘Bixby’ for Samsung powered smartphones, smart homes, and other devices.

Bixby is designed to interact with the devices in such a way that machine learns and adapts from the human interaction and not the other way around. “Samsung has employed artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of our user interface designs. Bixby is the ongoing result of this effort,” said Jong Rhee, Executive Vice President of Samsung.

The company expects its voice assistant to compete with the likes of Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant and announced that it will debut with the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphones, which will launch on 29 March.

“Bixby will be a new intelligent interface on our devices,” said Jong Rhee on the company’s blogspot.

The company clearly states that Bixby is way unique from its competitors and characterized its important features into three properties.

• Completeness - Bixby is a complete solution for the conventional interface, meaning that it will support all the tasks which the application is capable of performing using touch commands.

• Context Awareness - The digital assistant is capable of understanding the current context and state of the application and also lets the user carry out the current work-in-progress without any interruption.

• Cognitive Tolerance - The major feature is that it understand natural language. With given piece of information, Bixby can understand and interpret the language and takes action, accordingly.

As per the release, the launch of Bixby will begin with smartphones and will be gradually released to all devices powered by Samsung. The company confirmed that Bixby will soon be made available to control the air conditioners and televisions, but there is no official confirmation of the exact dates.  

“With the continued investment from Samsung on artificial intelligence, the possibility of what Bixby can become is endless,” concluded Jong Rhee.