Samsung unveils Bixby assistant to rival Siri, Alexa and Assistant

Samsung has officially announced its virtual assistant called Bixby, and it will come along with the Galaxy S8. The assistant will even get its own dedicated button on the Galaxy S8.

With this move, The South Korean tech giant will take on Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa. According to Samsung, Bixby is different and will do better than competing virtual assistants as it built to learn to adapt to humans and offers deeper experience due to its proficiency in three properties – completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance.

A Bixby enabled app will be able to perform almost every task, that the app is capable of performing when using the touch commands.  However, it’s worth mentioning that these apps need to support Bixby. Further users will also be able to call Bixby at any time, even while using an app 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. 

The cognitive tolerance property of Bixby, will allow the virtual assistant to understand commands with incomplete information, and execute the required task to the best of its knowledge, however it will prompt users further to provide more information to complete the task. This makes the interface more natural and easier to use.

Samsung says at the launch of Galaxy S8, only a subset of pre-installed apps will be Bixby enabled, but the number of supported apps will continue to expand over the time. The company also plans to release SDK to let third party developers to integrate services of Bixby into their app. It also said that Bixby will be applied to other products as well like air conditioner or TV and more. 

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