As promised, Samsung has released the long awaited Bixby Voice feature with English support to the flagship Galaxy S8 and the S8+.
The company has been conducting Bixby Voice beta testing for over a month to improve its features. Samsung, based on feedback of the registered developers, has now optimised the intuitive feature.
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"There are over 10,000 functions on our smartphones (Samsung), but each day, people may use less than five percent of them. The features on your phone are only useful if you know how to find them," Injong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services of Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics, said in a statement.
"Our goal with Bixby is to make it easier to use our phones, creating the best possible user experience for our customers. That's why we created Bixby – an intuitive new way to do more things with your phone," Rhee added.
Samsung Bixby Voice was first made available in the company's home market in South Korea. Now, the English version has made its way to US and the company is expected to roll-out in more markets in the coming days.
What Samsung Bixby Voice can do?
With the latest Bixby update, Galaxy S8 series owners can perform almost every task, even conventional touch gesture commands, on their phone using just the voice.
Currently, the rival digital assistant has been mastered in a few select applications leading to confusion among users. The commands of the digital assistant works through touch and voice.
It is capable of integrating all the information available online. Instead of inclining on some select apps installed in the phone for a particular service, Bixby can also intuitively improve itself by learning users' preferences over time.
Most notable aspect of Bixby is that it allows users to navigate the phone however they like to use—with both voice and touch, or by switching seamlessly between the two. This is very unique to Bixby and no other digital assistant in the market has this switching feature.
Currently, Bixby is fully integrated into native apps and will be integrated into select third-party apps, making it easier to find and use their best features.
It completes multi-app, complex requests; for instance, you can ask Bixby to procure group pictures from your latest vacation, and send them to your friends. And if Bixby doesn't understand a step, it will complete as much of the task as possible, rather than not even starting, Samsung claims.
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For the uninitiated, Bixby is developed by Samsung in collaboration with the recently-acquired start-up Viv Labs, which was founded by original Apple Siri-creators.
In a related development, Samsung is working on smart home speaker along the lines of Amazon's Alexa-powered Echo, Apple HomePod and Google Home.
Read more: Samsung developing AI-based Bixby smart speaker
Watch this space for latest news on Samsung products.
