Samsung Launches “Intelligent” Bixby Virtual Assistant

Samsung has officially unveiled its Bixby virtual assistant, an “intelligent interface” which, unlike the likes of Siri, Cortana, or Alexa, uses AI to problem-solve, rather than just fulfil voice requests, according to the South Korean company. Bixby is based on Viv, which was developed by Siri creator Dag Kittlaus. Samsung bought Viv back in October 2016 and developed the technology into Bixby, and the technology is set to debut on the Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone later this month.

Samsung claims that Bixby is able to extrapolate commands from limited information and is able to learn how to fill in missing information to fulfil tasks on your behalf, a function intended to make its use and interface more efficient and intuitive.

According to Samsung, Bixby is able to offer a unique virtual assistant experience due to its:

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.

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.

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.

The Samsung Galaxy S8, along with Bixby, is released on 29^th March.