Samsung announced the release of Bixby, the virtual interface, and assistant that will be available in the Galaxy 8 and the Galaxy S8+. Samsung also announced that they have many developers working on making Bixby more than just a phone assistant.
They say that the new virtual interface will play a big part in their brand, a piece that will push them forward in the tech world. Once Bixby is fully developed, users will be able to control almost every Samsung device through the phone assistant.
According to Samsung, Bixby will stand out in from the market competition, as it is different from existent phone assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa. Samsung’s new technology has been carefully kept from the public, its name being one of the few characteristics known, as well as a featured button on new Samsung devices that will allow Bixby to launch and assist.
Samsung’s new technology has been carefully kept from the public, its name is one of the few characteristics known, as well as a featured button on new Samsung devices that will allow Bixby to launch and assist.
Bixby will adapt to users’ voice commands
This Monday, Samsung released a statement on its blog explaining Bixby’s features, which they expect will place them in the market because they offer a technology that isn’t developed by other tech companies.
Samsung states that with Bixby, they used artificial intelligence, reinforcing learning concepts to the core of their user interface. According to them, the assistant will not be an option that requires you to learn new specific commands, because Bixby will adapt and evolve to your needs while you’re using it.
InJong Rhee, Samsung’s Executive Vice President and Head of R&D Software and Services, explained in the blog release that technology is supposed to make life easier, but lately, interfaces are becoming complicated for users, who can’t benefit from every feature that the interface provides.
“Samsung has a conceptually new philosophy to the problem: instead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world (a reflection of the abilities of designers), it is the machine that needs to learn to adapt to us,” wrote Rhee on the statement.
Rhee explains that Bixby will differentiate itself from other assistants because it succeeds at completeness, context awareness, and cognitive tolerance. What this means is that once that an application is enabled with Bixby, the assistant will be able to support almost every task the application can perform.
Context awareness means that Bixby will be able to understand the context of any application and ensure that the user can continue their work in progress. They believe this is a state of the art feature because current assistance interfaces in the market dictate the interaction modality and can’t support switching modalities on the device.
“The interface must be natural and intuitive enough to flatten the learning curve regardless of the number of functions being added. With this new approach, Samsung has employed artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of our user interface designs. Bixby is the ongoing result of this effort,” Rhee added on the statement.
Cognitive tolerance means that Bixby will be able to understand commands with incomplete information, adapting to the user and adding such information on its memory, as opposed to other phone assistants that require specific voice commands to access some features. The more time you spend with Bixby, the better it’ll assist you in the future.
Image Credit: Tech Times
Ambition takes time
Samsung knows that learning a new interface can be challenging and in some cases tiresome, causing some users to revert to the touch interface.
They believe that Bixby is designed in a manner that will remove friction from the interface, making the experience significantly more rewarding than previous interfaces. The phone assistant will, according to them, simplify new voice commands and will make the experience an intuitive and easy task.
Rhee adds that there will be a button on the devices to call Bixby, a feature that drew speculations after some picture of the Samsung Galaxy 8 leaked. The new interface might guarantee that the anticipated device will be very demanded.
“There has been a lot of excitement and speculation about what we will deliver with the launch of the Galaxy 8 later this month, especially due to the advancements in artificial intelligence. We do have a bold vision of revolutionizing the human-to-human machine interface, but that vision won’t be realized overnight. Ambition takes time,” wrote Rhee.
For the launch of the Galaxy 8, Rhee affirms that it will contain a preinstalled set of Bixby-enabled applications, and they are working on expanding that set of applications. They expect to release a tool in SDK to provide third-party developers the chance to make their Bixby-enabled applications.
Bixby will work with smartphones for now, following the release of the Galaxy 8, but Rhee explains that gradually users will be able to use Bixby to control other Samsung devices, like air conditioners and TVs.
“With the continued investment from Samsung on artificial intelligence, the possibility of what Bixby can become is endless,” finishes Rhee in the statement.
Source: Droid Life