Update 12.04.2017: When the Galaxy S8 goes on general sale later this month, it will be missing a key feature. Samsung has confirmed to Axios that it will be shipping the flagship phone without Bixby Voice.
While Bixby will launch with Vision, Home and its notifications features, the Voice functions won't be available until “later this spring.” The South Korean firm had previously said the full Bixby experience would be delayed and this confirms it.
Original story
Back in October last year, Samsung made quite a statement about its commitment to advancing digital assistants on its devices when it acquired Viv, the innovative AI assistant company. At the time, Samsung said "the deal showcases Samsung’s 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.” Read more: Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+: everything you need to know about the new phones
Viv’s chief executive officer, Dag Kittlaus, who was part of the team behind Siri, the digital assistant Apple bought in 2010, said during a public demo of Viv earlier that year that he wanted the system to be “the intelligence interface for everything”, and that Viv is the “simplest way for anyone to talk to devices and services everywhere”.
To achieve this lofty status, Viv has an interconnected nature, which processes conversational and complex queries that more closely resemble how people actually talk. Viv uses “breakthroughs” in program synthesis so that its AI is supposedly capable of writing its own code to accomplish new tasks. Viv calls this ability to create programs to handle specific tasks on the fly “dynamic program generation”. Think about it, that's a program on your phone that, every time you put a question to it, it writes its own software to best answer that query.
Understandably then, expectations are high for Bixby, the first digital assistant Samsung has created since securing all that Viv power.
Samsung says it created Bixby on four pillars. First, completeness. The aim is to make sure you can do everything on the Galaxy S8 with just your voice, without touch. Once an app is compatible with Bixby, you will be able to use your voice to control and manage "almost every task" that particular app is capable of, and which are typically controlled using touch commands. ing the behaviours of the agent much more predictable," Rhee said.
Second, context awareness. Bixby will supposedly be able to understand context so you can refer to pictures or films as "this" or "that" and it will know to what you are referring. Third, cognitive tolerance. Bixby must understand the whole sentence you are saying, rather than just words – and if it does not understand some of the task being asked of it, it will go as far as it can before asking for clarification rather than doing anything at all. Lastly, the experience has to be "frictionless". Read more: We finally know why Samsung's Galaxy Note 7s 'exploded'
Samsung believes it's a pain for us to wake up a digital assistant vocally so has placed a dedicated Bixby button on the sides of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ meaning you can "start actions right away". Instead of turning on and unlocking the phone, looking for the phone application, clicking on the contact bar to search for a person and making a call, Samsung said all of this will be possible with a push of the Bixby button and a simple command.
During WIRED's, admittedly very brief, demo, Bixby could indeed recognise the context of certain requests. For example, if you take photos, you can tell Bixby to make a folder without having to tell it what pictures to include as it guesses you are referring to the ones you have just taken. You can also ask it, for example, to make a folder for photos taken in London.
Samsung has also partnered with third-party companies such as FourSquare and Vivino so Bixby can use the Galaxy S8's camera to search visually by scanning a bottle of wine. It then sources information on the bottle and finds the same, or similar, vintages to buy. The Samsung Galaxy S8 will also come with Google Assistant, if you'd rather not use Bixby.
At launch, Bixby will integrate with several Samsung native apps including Camera, Contacts, Gallery, Messages and Settings. Samsung said this range will expand over time and it plans to eventually release a tool (in SDK) so third-party developers can add support for Bixby in their applications and services. Beyond that, Bixby will be rolled out to Samsung TVs, fridges and other smart appliances.
The secret to these digital assistants, however, lies not just in their ability to make activities easier (or purely voice controlled), but also in making them quicker. This is vital. Anyone can use Siri to call up a number, for example, but we all know it is much speedier to do it manually - thus negating the technology almost entirely.
WIRED's demo of Bixby was impressive in that it could work via voice control to perform tasks more complicated than we are used to with rival digital assistants. But the speed at which it did some of these tasks was not lightning quick. It is important to note this is not the final version of the software.
Also, those hoping to get a full-fat version of Viv with all its abilities to understand long, complex queries may be disappointed. Right now, Bixby is nowhere near as sophisticated as Viv was when it was publicly demoed. Part of this reason, apparently, is that Bixby has to be able to understand many more languages than Viv did. Following the launch in April, Bixby will only respond to US English, and Korean from May.
Kate Beaumont, director commercial strategy, product and planning at Samsung, told WIRED: "We've utilised some of Viv for building Bixby." Although, Beaumont was unable to confirm just how much.
"What you are looking at here is a first stage," she added. "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."
"Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, but 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 these many functions conveniently," said InJong Rhee, executive vice president, head of R&D software and services at Samsung when it announced Bixby ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S8 launch event. "Samsung has a conceptually new philosophy to target this problem: instead of humans learning how a machine interacts with the world, it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to us."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
