Samsung introduces its own Voice Assistant – Bixby

Finally Samsung has its own Voice Assistant and it is called Bixby.

According to Samsung’s InJong Rhee, CTO of Samsung Mobile and the architect behind Bixby, as the capabilities of machines such as smartphones, PCs, home appliances and IoT devices become more diverse, the interfaces on these devices are becoming too complicated for users to take advantage of many of these functions conveniently. 

“User interface designers have to make tradeoff decisions to cram many functions into a small screen or bury them deeper in layers of menu trees. Ultimately users are at the mercy of the designers with an increasingly steep curve that makes learning a new device difficult. This is the fundamental limitation of the current human-to-machine interface.”

“Since Samsung makes millions of devices, this problem impacts the core of our business.”

“Samsung has a conceptually new philosophy to the problem:  instead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world (a reflection of the abilities of designers), it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to us.  The interface must be natural and intuitive enough to flatten the learning curve regardless of the number of functions being added. With this new approach, Samsung has employed artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of our user interface designs.”

“Bixby is the ongoing result of this effort.”

Bixby will be a new intelligent interface on Samsung’s devices. InJong says Bixby is fundamentally different from other voice agents or assistants such as Siri or Alexa as it offers a deeper experience thanks to proficiency in these three properties:

1. Completeness
   When an application becomes Bixby-enabled, Bixby will be able to support almost every  task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface (ie. touch commands).  Most existing agents currently support only a few selected tasks for an application and therefore confuse users about what works or what doesn’t work by voice command. The completeness property of Bixby will simplify user education on the capability of the agent, making the behaviors of the agent much more predictable.
2. Context Awareness
   When using a Bixby-enabled application, users will be able to call upon Bixby at any time and it will understand the current context and state of the application and will allow users to carry out the current work-in-progress continuously.  Bixby will allow users to weave various modes of interactions including touch or voice at any context of the application, whichever they feel is most comfortable and intuitive.  Most existing agents completely dictate the interaction modality and, when switching among the modes, may either start the entire task over again, losing all the work in progress, or simply not understand the user’s intention.
3. Cognitive Tolerance
   When the number of supported voice commands gets larger, most users are cognitively challenged to remember the exact form of the voice commands. Most agents require users to state the exact commands in a set of fixed forms. Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the commanded task to the best of its knowledge, and then will prompt users to provide more information and take the execution of the task in piecemeal. This makes the interface much more natural and easier to use.

Bixby is Samsung’s first step on a journey to completely open up new ways of interacting with a phone.

At the launch of the Galaxy S8 in the next couple of days, Samsung says that a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled. This set will continue to expand over time.

The plan is to eventually release a tool (in SDK) to enable third-party developers to make their applications and services Bixby-enabled easily.

There will be a dedicated Bixby button that will be located on the side of the Samsung S8. Samsung believes that this should remove confusion around activating a voice interface so as to make it feel easier and more comfortable to give 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 all these steps with one push of the Bixby button and a simple command.

Starting with smartphones, Bixby will be gradually applied to all of Samsung’s appliances.  This means in the future,  you would be able to control your air conditioner or TV through Bixby.

Welcome Bixby!