Samsung has finally made it official that the company's very own voice-powered digital assistant Bixby will make its debut with the upcoming flagship model Galaxy S8, which is set to be unveiled next week by the South Korean smartphone makers.
Although, Bixby enters a crowded field of virtual assistants, such as, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, Google's Google Assistant etc, the consumer electronics giant claims that Bixby is different than others, as it will focus mostly on letting people control mobile apps with spoken directives.
According to the creators, Bixby will be able to control almost all tasks in an app, instead of limited sets like other virtual assistants and it is also going to be flexible in understanding what the users are saying, even if it's an incomplete command. "We do have a bold vision of revolutionising the human-to-machine interface, but that vision won't be realized overnight," Samsung Electronics head of research and development Injong Rhee said in a release.
The Galaxy S8 will have a pre-installed set of applications that will support and work with Bixby, said Samsung.
"Bixby will be our first step on a journey to completely open up new ways of interacting with your phone," said Rhee, "Bixby will be a new intelligent interface on our devices."
The announcement by Samsung confirms that the extra button on the left side under the volume toggle of the Samsung Galaxy S8, as was seen in various leaks, is indeed the button dedicated to Bixby, the new "agent" of the company. So, with Galaxy S8, Bixby is just one tap away.
Last year Samsung had acquired an artificial intelligence start-up Viv. Its co-founders were the part of the team that created Siri, that Apple bought around seven years ago.
