TechTheDay

As reported before, some of Bixby’s features were turned off as the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus hits the shelves last April. After months of waiting Samsung has finally updated Bixby’s voice capabilities for US territories. For other places, there is still no word from Samsung on when will Bixby’s voice function be available.

For those who don’t know Bixby is Samsung’s artificial intelligence assistant that was supposedly to come packaged in the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus smartphones. The idea of Bixby was that its supposed to be the perfect AI assistant for your S8 and future Samsung products. As Samsung product’s functions increase, so does their devices’ complexity. The AI assistant was created to help you take control those complex functions. It can know anything about the state of your phone at anytime and understand natural language so it can respond to even the most simple commands. It is Samsung’s response to other AI assistant technologies, such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

The reason the features were turned off during launch was that there are some issues with Bixby’s English and voice recognition when it comes to the Korean language. So Samsung was worried that Bixby might get some negative points and Samsung is trying to avoid that and make Bixby’s debut as perfect as possible. They might’ve also feared that any negative reviews of Bixby might also become negative points to its debuting device, the Galaxy S8. Samsung’s trying to avoid having the S8 gain some negative reviews or points as well because they’re trying to fix their reputation after that incident with the faulty batteries.

Improving Bixby

What’s great about delaying the full deployment of Bixby is that they are able to improve on Bixby’s features. Samsung had the chance to work with 100,000 people who’re using the S8 and S8 Plus in an  early access preview program. Their feedback was of great help to Samsung, who was able to increase and refine Bixby’s capabilities further.

For example, Samsung was able to increase Bixby’s vocabulary so it can understand different variations of the same command. Commands such as “What’s the weather” or “Show me today’s forecast” will be understood as the same command. They were also able to improve its response time and free hand operations. Samsung also worked on Bixby so that it is able to interact with 3rd party apps. Since they’re aiming for Bixby to become the perfect AI assistant then being able to work with different apps like Google Maps or Gmail makes sense. You should be able to ask Bixby to locate a specific destination for you or make Bixby read you emails aloud.

Catch Up

Now that Bixby is fully functional it needs to be able to catch up to its competitors, who are working hard already at gaining territories in the market. For example, Google Assistant is gaining ground in Australia with their Google Home. One of the features that the Aussies liked about it is that its able to use Australia’s native slangs and lingos, something that had virtual assistants fail for in years. However Google seems to be unable to penetrate Siri’s dominion with Apple users. Downloads for Google Assistant in the iOS peaked as early as its first week of availability with more than 24,000 downloads. Since then it has fallen quite far, getting only less than a thousand downloads by this month.

Alexa, too, is quickly advancing as they get into HTC’s U11. But it isn’t the only assistant in there as the squeezable phone also has Google Assistant. Users are able to switch between the two assistants but Alexa not being native to the U11 might prove to be as much an obstacle as Google is experiencing in the iPhone.