Still on Bixby, Samsung Galaxy S8’s smart personal assistant

Samsung Galaxy S8 has got everyone in the gadget universe talking. The commentaries might die down until the arrival of iPhone 8. But while some are hailing device as the best thing to happen to the smartphone world, others are already seeing as the company’s ‘smart’ fix for the myriads of challenges it has grappled with in recent times.

Bixby has our particular attention though.

Whatever you might say about Samsung, you cannot take away its determination to set itself apart from competition. Forget the bursting batteries in Galaxy Note 7, it was an unfortunate episode; Galaxy S8 from the look and feel appears a potential ‘winner’.

Case in point is Microsoft renewed courting of Samsung following launch of the new device. The goal is to partner with Samsung for a “Microsoft Edition” of the new Galaxy S8. Whether the collaboration works or not, it is like the saying “success has many friends”.

As far friends and virtual personal assistants go, Bixby is Samsung’s closest has ever come in delving into an arena its major rivals Google (Assistant) and Apple (Siri) has been playing for some time now.

Samsung Bixby is a virtual personal assistant – some analysts refer to it as an app – that comes in three parts Bixby Voice, Bixby Home, Bixby Vision. Its origin can be traced to Samsung’s acquisition of Viv, an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) company on October 2016.

The acquisition, according to Samsung at the time, was to showcase its commitment to virtual personal assistants “and is part of the company’s broader vision to deliver an AI-based open ecosystem across all of its devices and services.”

Although Viv which was also a virtual personal assistant is dead and Bixby lives, some analysts have already noted that some components of the former can be found in the latter. Samsung has also confirmed this.

Kate Beaumont, director commercial strategy, product and planning at Samsung told Wired in an interview “We have utilised some of Viv for building Bixby.”

The company however said Bixby was created on four pillars the first being completeness. Here, Samsung’s goal is to ensure that users of Galaxy S8 are able to do everything on the device just be speaking without touching anything. As long as an app is deemed compatible with Bixby, users are able to use their voice to control and manage everything that particular app offers.

The second pillar is context awareness. Samsung is projecting that Bixby will be able to understand context in the sense that users of Galaxy S8 can refer to images or videos on the device as “this” or “that” and it will tell you exactly what you are referring to.

Ability for cognitive tolerance is the third pillar of Bixby. By cognitive tolerance, the virtual personal assistant must understand the whole sentence a user makes, rather than just words. However if it fails to understand some of the task it is being asked to provide, it will go as far as it can go before asking for clarification, instead of doing nothing at all.

The final pillar is that users must have a “frictionless” experience. In this regard, Samsung does not want the user to wake up Bixby vocally hence it made available a dedicated Bixby button by the sides of Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus to help “start actions right away”.

Samsung is not shutting out pre-existing assistants like Google Assistant. Galaxy S8 also comes with it for users who will prefer what they are familiar with. There are other collaborations with third-party companies like FourSquare and Vivino to enable Bixby use the Galaxy S8’s camera to search visually. For instance when it scans a bottle of wine, it sources information on the bottle and finds the same, or similar, vintages to buy.

Before you get carried away, Bixby is far away from perfect.

“What you are looking at here is a first stage. Bixby will be in constant development. What we will be building on throughout the year is integration with third-party apps. It will also launch with Bixby Home, which builds up a profile based on time, location and occasion when you are using it – so it learns your habits and become familiar with your patterns and what you are doing. It will then push prompts and suggestions for you out of the apps it links with during those time frames,” Beaumont said.