
We have been hearing rumors for the past several months that the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 would include a new artificial intelligence assistant at release called Bixby. Samsung has just officially announced bixby, but it looks like it will be available for more than just the Galaxy S8. According to Samsung we will see Bixby on smartphones first, and then it will be gradually added to our appliances. We will be able to eventually use Bixby to control our TVs and even the air conditioner. Bixby will be implemented in the cloud so anything connected to wifi that has circuitry for voice input can be controlled by the ai assistant. This may end up being a total alexa/google home competitor.
Samsung says they are developing Bixby as an answer to the ever growing complication of smartphones and other technology. Instead of users having to learn new technology the technology should learn from and adapt to the human. According to Samsung Bixby will offer a deeper experience that other voice agents or assistants. The main difference will be thanks to it's proficiency in 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.
Bixby looks like it is going to be a pretty well rounded user friendly Assistant. I for one am excited about the prospect of being able to control all the things in my home with my voice. Do you think this kind of interaction with our tech is necessary?
via Samsung