Samsung Announces Bixby, Its New 'Intelligence Interface' for the Galaxy S8 and Other Devices

Samsung has officially announced Bixby, its new 'intelligence interface' for the Galaxy S8 and future devices that will rival Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana.

The company claims that Bixby is fundamentally different from other voice assistants on the market due to proficiency in these three areas:

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.

Notably, Samsung plans to added a dedicated Bixby button to its Galaxy S8 smartphone. At the launch of the Galaxy S8, a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled. This set will continue to expand over time. The company plans to eventually release an SDK to help third-party developers make their applications and services Bixby-enabled.

Bixby will be gradually rolled out to all Samsung appliances.


"In the future you would be able to control your air conditioner or TV through Bixby. Since Bixby will be implemented in the cloud, as long as a device has an internet connection and simple circuitry to receive voice inputs, it will be able to connect with Bixby."

Samsung is expected to unveil the new Galaxy S8 on March 29th.