Washington - Samsung on Monday officially revealed Bixby,
its new voice assistant and Siri rival. Bixby will debut on the Samsung Galaxy
S8, which the firm is revealing later this month, the company said in a blog
post.
Samsung has voice recognition, called S Voice, on its
phones. But analysts have been expecting a more sophisticated AI on Samsung
phones since last year when the company bought Viv, which was founded by Siri's
original creators. While the company didn't dish many details about Bixby, it
did lay out some intriguing promises about its new assistant.
For one, Samsung said that Bixby can control your phone
more thoroughly than other voice assistants. According to Samsung's post, Bixby
should let you operate compatible apps completely by voice, without having to
touch the screen at all. Some voice assistants, including Siri, can interact
with other apps in a limited way. For example, Siri can specifically order an
Uber or have Yelp look up a restaurant near you, but you have to use the touch
screen for other parts of those apps.
Bixby also shouldn't get confused if you want to mix and
match voice and touch controls. Samsung put it this way: "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." In plainer English, it sounds like you could, for example, ask
Bixby to open a restaurant reservation app, then use the touchscreen yourself
to whittle down your options before asking Bixby to place the reservation for
you.
Finally, Bixby is also supposed to be more
conversational. If it can't understand the way you've phrased a request,
Samsung said, it will do what it can, and then ask follow-up questions. That
way, users don't have to phrase things perfectly to be understood. Siri can
sometimes provoke rage when you're asking it to do something complex - only to
get a, "Sorry, I missed that" in return.
Of course, we won't know how well any of this works until
Bixby's public debut on the S8 next week. But if Samsung can deliver the big
promises it has made, it would offer far more to users than Siri does.