Today Samsung officially announced ‘Bixby,’ a digital assistant. We’ve been hearing rumors about Bixby for some time but now that Samsung has taken the wraps off the technology, what can we look forward to?

Bixby is an artificially intelligent virtual assistant and interface, which according to Samsung already has “thousands” of developers working to support it. Samsung has high ambitions for Bixby: yes, it’s going to be a core part of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 family, so much so that the new smartphone is going to have a dedicated Bixby hardware button. Bixby is also going to be embedded into most Samsung devices to allow remote control and much more.

Samsung has published a blog post written by Injong Rhee, Executive Vice President and Head of Research and Development at Samsung. Rhee explains that Bixby is designed to be adaptable to our natural language by using deep learning and artificial intelligence. This by itself is nothing new as other digital assistants are built using similar technologies. What makes Samsung’s efforts unique? Firstly, Bixby will be able to work with applications although developers will need to enable this first. Samsung has explained that a “subset of pre-installed applications” will be Bixby-enabled on the new Galaxy S8, and we can expect this to include Samsung’s stock applications for core smartphone functions, such as calling, messaging, working with appointments, and email. Samsung has yet to release a software development kit (SDK) for third-party developers to include Bixby compatibility, which is going to limit how useful the technology is with applications for now. There are, however, plans to “eventually release” the SDK at an undetermined time in the future.

On the face of it, Bixby is rather underwhelming. For the cynical, if Bixby only works with Samsung’s own applications, this is a way to try to force consumers to use Samsung’s own services. This is especially true when we consider how capable Bixby will be for those enabled applications; Samsung’s blog states that Bixby can do “almost every task” that we can do using conventional means (in other words, using our finger). Better yet, Bixby will also work with partial commands and users can mix and match how they work with enabled applications as they are most comfortable with. This is clever stuff, but from the sounds of it, Bixby is going to be limited at launch in terms of both its functionality and availability.

Samsung seems to be putting Bixby at the front and center of their software development. Samsung’s blog post discusses how Bixby will remove the friction of using a device; rather than the human learning how to use the machine, Samsung wants to use Bixby so that the machine learns how to interact with the human. Samsung is devoting a brand new button to Bixby so clearly big things are expected to come. It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how things develop – and especially to see how Bixby compares with the Google Assistant.

SOURCE [Samsung]