Samsung Galaxy S8 To Have Siri Competitor Bixby; Set To Rival Apple’s Virtual Assistant

Samsung recently confirmed that it will equip a new voice-driven virtual assistant called Bixby in its flagship device Galaxy S8. In a blog published on Monday by the company's executive vice president and head of R&D InJong Rhee, Bixby will finally change the way how Android users interact with their smartphones.

“instead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world (a reflection of the abilities of designers), it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to us.  The interface must be natural and intuitive enough to flatten the learning curve regardless of the number of functions being added. With this new approach, Samsung has employed artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of our user interface designs. Bixby is the ongoing result of this effort,” Rhee wrote.

USA Today notes that Rhee’s blog post did not explicitly mentioned its competitors in that service, which is namely Apple’s popular Siri, Google’s Cortana, Amazon Alexa, and the Microsoft Assistant. But is is clearly a nod to improve its S-voice feature on its current handsets.

On the other hand, CNBC notes that Samsung has yet to address a conflicting digital assistant, the Google assistant, which will be rolled out on all Android phones that are running on version 6.0 OS or newer.

Head of research Ben Wood at CCS Insight told the news site over the phone on Tuesday, "It is a challenge but this is the dance Samsung has to do in terms of its relationship with Google, where it has an agreement as a result of licensing Android to support certain features."