In an attempt to rival Apple's Siri and Google Assistant, Samsung has officially released its home-bred digital voice assistant Bixby in over 200 countries including the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa. Samsung's answer to Siri now offers support for English.
Earlier this year, the virtual assistant was released along with the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones. Until now, Bixby was not seen as a potential threat to Siri or Google Assistant. It could only recognise Korean as Samsung had restricted Bixby voice to its home turf of South Korea.
With Bixby's global roll-out Samsung will look to unsettle or perhaps dethrone Siri as the best smartphone virtual assistant. Samsung claims that Bixby learns over time and improves it's functionality by adapting to the way you speak. Bixby will be made available in more countries, languages, devices and third party applications over time.
"The expansion of Bixby's voice capabilities is an initial step in the continued rollout of Bixby's functionality", Injong Rhee, Executive V-P at Samsung Electronics said in a press statement.
Samsung's entry into the voice-assistant domain, comes just a few months after it released its own digital payment service, Samsung Pay to rival Apple Pay. What this means is that the virtual assistant space is all set for more updates and bugs fixes. Virtual assistants will become smarter and more friendlier, enhancing the overall user experience. Perhaps, Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa and Cortana will try and get our accents right and come out all guns blazing.
