Nowadays, virtual assistants are all the rage. We recently had an encounter with Moto Voice, the assistant for the impressive Moto Z. You will find a variant of the same from every major smart tech company, Goggle has Google Assistant, Amazon has Alexa, Apple has Siri and so forth. Samsung already has Samsung Voice but it seems time has come to make an overhaul. Meet Bixby, the virtual assistant that promises to adapt to you.
Bixby will come preinstalled in the Galaxy S8, it will even have its own dedicated button on the left side of the device to summon it at any moment. The magic behind this assistant is based on three properties namely, completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance.
Bixby will possess completeness in that it will support almost any task that a user can do in an app. It will not be limited to pre-sets commands like traditional assistants. Context awareness will be addressed by the fact that the assistant can be activated from any app using the side button. Once summoned, it will understand what you were trying to do and will proceed to offer help. Finally, Bixby will be cognitive tolerant in that it will understand your commands even when you give it incomplete information. The aim here is to make sure that the user can use natural language as if they were talking to another human being and still have the assistant respond accordingly. You won’t have to remember specific commands like you do with other voice assistants.
We only have to wait until 29th March for the launch of the Galaxy S8 to see if this assistant lives up to its promises. Initially, Bixby will be available only on smartphones, but Samsung has plans for extending it to other appliances too. In the near future, it won’t be so strange to talk to your Samsung fridge asking for recipe suggestions.