Bixby: A New Way to Interact with Your Phone

Samsung’s new virtual assistant will make using your phone easier

Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are all known for having smart, artificial intelligence-equipped digital assistants, and now you can add Samsung into that mix. Today, the company has officially announced its own spin on the virtual assistant, and it’s calling it Bixby.

Technology is supposed to make life easier, but as the capabilities of machines such as smartphones, PCs, home appliances and devices become more diverse, the interfaces on these devices are becoming too complicated for users to take advantage of many of these functions conveniently. User interface designers have to make tradeoff decisions to cram many functions into a small screen or bury them deeper in layers of menu trees. Ultimately users are at the mercy of the designers with an increasingly steep curve that makes learning a new device difficult. This is the fundamental limitation of the current human-to-machine interface.  Since Samsung makes millions of devices, this problem impacts the core of our business

Bixby will be a new intelligent interface

Bixby will be a new intelligent interface on our devices. Fundamentally different from other voice agents or assistants in the market

“Bixby is an intelligent user interface, emphasis on interface,” says Rhee. “A lot of other agents are focused on being knowledgeable, providing answers to fact-based questions, glorified extensions of search. Bixby is capable of developing a new interface to our devices, or devices that are going to host Bixby.” It’s designed to let you seamlessly switch between voice commands and touch interfaces, and help you along various steps of your task. Samsung says this is different from other assistants, which try to complete every task from start to finish and fail completely if they are unable to. “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,” explains the company in its blog post. Bixby may not be able to do everything at first, but it will get you as far along as it can in the task before you have to intervene.

Samsung knows it can’t compete with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others when it comes to raw machine learning power and putting vast amounts of information at your fingertips, so it’s using Bixby to solve a simpler task that those companies have largely ignored. It’s not hugely different from Google’s efforts with Now on Tap, but Samsung argues that its deeper integration of Bixby within apps will make it more useful and more reliable than prior efforts.

The overarching goal, according to Rhee, is “to make the interface of the phone simpler and more natural to use.” He claims that out of the box, our smartphones can perform over 10,000 tasks, while current digital assistants — he contends — can only do about 100. Samsung’s goal is to have Bixby be able to perform every task that you can do with touch via voice. “Everything you can do with a touch command, you can do with a voice command when using a Bixby-enabled application,” boasts Rhee.