Samsung Elec claims its voice assistant on Galaxy S8 to be smartest up to date

The voice-activated personal assistant that would mount on upcoming Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S8 flagship can activate all the phone functions done by fingers and ask back if it did not fully understand the command, according to a senior company executive.

Bixby - Samsung Electronics’ competition to Siri of Apple and Google Assistant - would be unlike any other voice assistants already active in the market in terms of “completeness, context awareness, and cognitive tolerance,” wrote Samsung Electronics Executive Vice President Rhee In-jong in Samsung Electronics news page.

Bixby allows users to activate almost every touch-enabled function through voice commands and understands context better than its earlier rivals as it is capable of asking follow-up questions.

Rhee said Samsung is trying to address the “fundamental limitation of the current human-to machine interface.” One typically must go through several steps to call someone - unlocking the phone, looking up the number, and pressing to make the call. But Bixby will save all the work with just a single voice command.

Bixby will make its debut when the company unveils its new flagship smartphone Galaxy S8 in New York at the end of this month.

Rhee In-jong

One distinctive function is that Bixby will ask back if it didn’t understand the command.

“Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the commanded task to the best of its knowledge,” said Rhee, adding that “it will prompt users to provide more information and take the execution of the task in piecemeal.”

The Galaxy S8 will have a dedicated button for Bixby on the side of the phone to allow users to activate the voice assistant without having to touch the screen, according to the company.

As Bixby is a latecomer to the global digital assistant race, there are not many applications linked to it compared to other voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri that are able to work with numerous applications. Samsung Electronics said it will release Bixby’s software development kit (SDK) to allow application developers to make their apps Bixby-enabled.

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