Button dedicated to activating Bixby on the Galaxy S8
There are only 9 days until the launch of the next Galaxy S8 and S8 +And while we've seen a massive amount of leaks lately, Samsung has now decided to confirm one of the devices' future features.
It was InJong Rhee himself, Executive Vice President and Head of Research and Development at Samsung, who officially announced the new artificial intelligence assistant Bixby, which will be integrated into the company's future smartphones, starting with the Galaxy S8.
Furthermore, the same representative stated that the Galaxy S8 will have an additional button on the left side, which will be used exclusively to activate Bixby.
Main uses of Bixby
Samsung claimed that Bixby is different from the other virtual assistants out there right now, including Siri or Google Assistant. According to the company, this artificial intelligence platform will learn as users ask for things in order to adapt exactly to their preferences.
Also, the company stated that Bixby was developed based on three important pillars: integrity, knowledge of the context and cognitive tolerance.
The concept of integrity refers to the fact that Bixby will be able to do "almost" any task that you ask for any application that the user has installed. The only problem is that the app developers will have to add support for Bixby, something that will probably take several months.
InJong Rhee, Executive Vice President of Samsung and head of the R&D, Software and Services department
Through the second concept, contextual knowledge, Bixby can be activated even while using an application, and in theory it should know what it should do for you. For example, if you are inside the calendar application and you activate Bixby, the software should offer you the possibility to organize the day, to view future appointments that you have pending or other similar things.
Finally, the third concept, that of cognitive tolerance, will allow Bixby to be increasingly intelligent to the point of understanding your commands even if you send them with incomplete information. In these cases, it will perform the task it thinks it should do first, and will prompt you for additional details shortly after. In this way, you won't have to remember specific commands for each task in part.
All this can be done in a much easier way thanks to the dedicated button for activating Bixby, it is clearly much easier to activate it with a button than to say through the voice.
The bad news is that when the next Galaxy S8 and S8 + arrive, there will only be a subset of pre-installed apps with support for Bixby. But Samsung promised to add more apps over time, and there are even plans to launch a development kit (SDK) for all developers who are interested in adding this functionality to their applications.
Also, although Bixby debuts with the Galaxy S8, Samsung plans to integrate its virtual assistant into a wider range of devices, including electronic devices other than smartphones.
To see Bixby in action, remember that next March 29 we will be able to take a first look at how it works after the presentation of the Galaxy S8 and S8 +.
