Bixby, Samsung’s very own smart assistant, has been officially out for over a year now but it hasn’t really gained any significant traction. We learned about it as early as 2016 when the Galaxy S8 was said to have Bixby pre-installed and that it would work with native apps. It did show up in an official Samsung beta page and we were soon told the AI assistant would have visual text recognition and item search capabilities. The feature arrived with a Bixby button which can be remapped for other functions and purposes.
Samsung’s Bixby isn’t exactly our favorite voice assistant right now especially if you’ll compare it to the Google Assistant or Alexa but it’s fine. It works for Samsung devices although it rolled out last year with a few issues including not being fully ready yet at launch, not working, and being delayed again and again.
We knew a Bixby 2.0 would be released with major improvements. It was tagged as a smarter assistant. It should be smarter with the addition of Chinese support and the ability to easily track calories. Of course, it’s expected to have better AI.
We’re expecting Bixby will be able to do more especially the South Korean tech giant is launching a software developers kit. The Bixby SDK will be coupled with API (application programming interface). This way, development and integrations will be easier for Samsung phone owners.
Bixby is now set to challenge Alexa with the SDK and API so hopefully soon, we’ll get to try more apps for Samsung’s voice assistant. Samsung will reveal them in November at the Samsung Developer Conference happening in San Francisco, California.
This move will improve the skills and capabilities of Bixby both on phone and the Samsung Galaxy Home smart speaker. Samsung still needs some boosting in this area since it’s relatively newer.
Samsung may not beat the Google Assistant but it could challenge Amazon’s Alexa by allowing developers to come up with new skills and apps for Bixby.
VIA: CNBC
