Samsung has officially thrown its metaphorical hat into the virtual assistant fray with Bixby, its answer to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple’s good assistants.
As every of these product has matured, the overlap and differences between them become clearer, and Bixby appearance to be taking a unique tack again. while Google, Apple and Microsoft concentrate on creating their assistants able to perform (mostly) retrieval-based tasks (‘what will the weather be like tomorrow?’), Bixby is looking to be more of a platform with an extensible eco-system, a little closer to Amazon’s Alexa.
Samsung, however, has a whole range of different devices to support – phones, computers, home appliances, good devices and more – therefore it’s focusing on creating all those disparate devices simple to use via voice commands, which it says will make Bixby fundamentally totally different to current voice assistants.
The aim of Bixby, Samsung says, is to make all devices and apps seamlessly practical via either voice or touch, while delivering contextually relevant options depending on the device and what the user is trying to achieve. In future, Samsung says it wants Bixby to be able to perceive incomplete commands and pieces of information too, reducing the requirement for the user to say any specific phrase or command to achieve an operation.
Perhaps more interestingly is the want from Samsung to “reduce friction” associated with getting used to a brand new voice command system. As part of that, it confirmed that its next device will have a dedicated Bixby button on the facet.
“Confusion around activating a voice interface is a barrier we’ve removed to create it feel easier and more comfortable to provide commands. for example, instead of taking multiple steps to make a call – turning on and unlocking the phone, looking for the phone application, clicking on the contact bar to search for the person that you’re trying to call and pressing the phone icon to start dialing – you will be able to do of these steps with one push of the Bixby button and a simple command,” Samsung said.
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