Samsung a little while ago on its own blog officially introduced Bixby - a brand new virtual assistant that will appear for the first time in Galaxy S8. The South Korean giant unexpectedly did so before the very debut of this year's flagship models, which will take place on March 29 at a conference in New York and London.
Samsung said that Bixby is fundamentally different from current virtual assistants like Siri or Cortana in that it will be deeply embedded directly into applications. Using the assistant, it will be possible to control basically every part of the application, so instead of touching the screen, the user will be able to use his voice and perform any task that the application can do.
In applications that will support Bixby, the user will be able to use commands and words directly for a specific environment at any time (for example, special buttons that will only be in the given application). The assistant will always understand the user, even when the user communicates incompletely informace. Bixby will be intelligent enough to guess the rest and execute the command based on its best knowledge.
The company also confirmed that for Bixby there will be on Galaxy S8 to Galaxy S8+ dedicated special button on the side of the phone. According to the information so far, this should be located on the left side just below the volume buttons.
Dr. Injong Rhee, director of software development and services at Samsung, said for The Verge:
“Most virtual assistants today are knowledge-centric, providing fact-based answers and serving as an augmented search engine. But Bixby is able to develop a new interface for our devices and for all future ones that will support the new assistant."
Bixby will initially support ten pre-installed apps on Galaxy S8. But the new intelligent interface will be extended to other Samsung phones and even to other products such as televisions, watches, smart bracelets and air conditioners. In the future, Samsung plans to open up Bixby to apps from third-party developers.
