Samsung, India’s biggest and most trusted smartphone brand, today announced that its Bixby voice capabilities will be available in India, allowing consumers to experience a smarter way to interact with their smartphones. Bixby, Samsung’s intelligent interface, will enable consumers in India to get things done faster and easier.

Starting today, the newly launched Samsung Galaxy Note8, Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ users can enable Bixby’s voice capabilities in US English by pressing the Bixby button. Consumers can activate Bixby by holding the dedicated button on the Galaxy Note8, Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones, or by simply saying, “Hi, Bixby.”

Staying true to Samsung’s legacy of ‘Make for India’, Bixby has been optimized to understand Indian accents. So it does not matter from which part of the country you are, Bixby will work hard to understand you and take care of your activities.

“At Samsung, we listen to our consumers and bring in meaningful innovations that help make their lives better. With Bixby, the phone adapts to you and not the other way around. It’s a smarter way to use your phone and get more done. Keeping in mind the diversity in Indian accents and our commitment to ‘Make for India’, Bixby has been optimized to understand Indian accents,” said Mr. Asim Warsi, Senior Vice President, Mobile Business, Samsung India.

The development of Bixby voice capabilities for Indian consumers was carried out at Samsung Research & Development Institute, Bangalore (SRI-B), Samsung’s largest R&D facility outside Korea.

Bixby brings enhanced smartphone productivity and personalization through Quick Commands, a feature that allows customers to easily create a custom voice command to use in place of a sequence of one or more commands. For example, one can use the command “good night” as a shortcut for “Turn on Do-not-disturb mode, set an alarm for 6:00 AM and turn on blue light filter.”

Bixby understands the way you actually speak, ask questions and make requests. For example, if you take a photo and then tell Bixby to “send the picture just taken to Mom”, Bixby understand cross-application commands and will know which photo you are referring to and will text it to your mom. This natural language understanding makes interacting with your smartphone easier and more intuitive. With its iterative deep learning technology, Bixby will improve over time to recognize your personal preferences and ways of speaking.

Bixby is an intelligent interface, rather than a standalone app. When an application becomes Bixby-enabled, Bixby will support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using voice, touch or text. Bixby’s deep integration is also built into the smartphone settings so that you can change phone options-such as setting the screen timeout or showing all notifications-without interrupting what you are currently doing.