Samsung announces to launch Siri rival 'Bixby'

Samsung has announced to launch an Artificial Intelligence (AI) virtual assistant which will be first run by Samsung Galaxy S8 mobile phone. The digital assistant would be rival to Apple’s Siri software and promises to make using mobile more easy.

In a statement, Samsung said Bixby will be a new intelligent interface on our devices. Fundamentally different from other voice agents or assistants in the market, Bixby offers a deeper experience thanks to proficiency in these three properties: completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance.

Completeness: Bixby will be able to support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using the touch commands.

Most existing agents currently support only a few selected tasks for an application and therefore confuse users about what works or what doesn’t work by voice command. The completeness property of Bixby will simplify user education on the capability of the agent, making the behaviors of the agent much more predictable, said Executive Vice President Software & Services and Head of R&D InJong Rhee.

Context Awareness: Users will be able to call upon Bixby at any time and it will understand the current context and state of the application and will allow users to carry out the current work-in-progress continuously.

Bixby will allow users to weave various modes of interactions including touch or voice at any context of the application, whichever they feel is most comfortable and intuitive. Most existing agents completely dictate the interaction modality and, when switching among the modes, may either start the entire task over again, losing all the work in progress, or simply not understand the user’s intention.

Cognitive Tolerance: When the number of supported voice commands gets larger, most users are cognitively challenged to remember the exact form of the voice commands.

Most agents require users to state the exact commands in a set of fixed forms. Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the commanded task to the best of its knowledge, and then will prompt users to provide more information and take the execution of the task in piecemeal. This makes the interface much more natural and easier to use.

Easy-to-use software

Bixby will simplify user education with new voice interfaces and will make using your phone even more seamless and intuitive. Another example of removing friction will be the dedicated Bixby button that will be located on the side of our next device, said InJong Rhee.

“Confusion around activating a voice interface is a barrier we have removed to make it feel easier and more comfortable to give commands. For example, instead of taking multiple steps to make a call – turning on and unlocking the phone, looking for the phone application, clicking on the contact bar to search for the person that you’re trying to call and pressing the phone icon to start dialing – you will be able to do all these steps with one push of the Bixby button and a simple command,” he said.

Future plan

Bixby will be our first step on a journey to completely open up new ways of interacting with your phone. At the launch of the Galaxy S8, a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled. This set will continue to expand over time. Our plan is to eventually release a tool (in SDK) to enable third-party developers to make their applications and services Bixby-enabled easily, said Samsung.

Starting with our smartphones, Bixby will be gradually applied to all our appliances. In the future you would be able to control your air conditioner or TV through Bixby. Since Bixby will be implemented in the cloud, as long as a device has an internet connection and simple circuitry to receive voice inputs, it will be able to connect with Bixby. As the Bixby ecosystem grows, we believe Bixby will evolve from a smartphone interface to an interface for your life.