Will Samsung’s Bixby AI Assistant Overtake Siri?

There’s been a lot of anticipation surrounding Samsung’s newly released Galaxy S8 pair, particularly because the new flagships are a chance for the beleaguered Korean tech giant to redeem its sorely damaged reputation. Samsung’s Bixby AI assistant for the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus is the company’s answer to the virtual assistants that are currently on the market, but it’s hard to tell how the competition will shake out because Samsung isn’t actually done working on Bixby.

Samsung hinted in a press release last week that Bixby is still very much a work in progress: “There has been a lot of excitement and speculation about what we will deliver with the launch of the Galaxy S8 later this month, especially due to the advancements in artificial intelligence. We do have a bold vision of revolutionizing the human-to-machine interface, but that vision won’t be realized overnight. Ambition takes time.”

Samsung has announced that it will continue working on Bixby right up until the S8 line arrives in stores, and probably long after. From there, Samsung plans to integrate Bixby into its other smart device lines.

What We Know About Bixby So Far

While we’re unsure of how Bixby will function in the real world, on paper it has a few noteworthy qualities that make it stand out. For one, it’s easy to access. Bixby has a dedicated button on the left side of the S8 that you can press to summon it, or you can utter the wake phrase, which is “Bixby.” It’s also accessible through the camera app. Bixby can also speak 52 languages, compared to the 21 languages that Siri has a grasp of.

Also, Bixby actually comes in three parts: Bixby Voice, Bixby Vision, and Bixby Home.

Bixby Voice

Bixby Voice is the most similar to the virtual assistants that we’re familiar with. But unlike Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, which primarily focus on drawing on web resources to answer your questions, Bixby’s focus is inward-oriented. Samsung’s headline for its homegrown AI is “anything you can do with touch, you can do with voice”. The company aims to one day allow you to use your device completely through Bixby, which is a pretty tall order and far from reality right now.

So far, Bixby Voice works with S8 functions like phone, messaging, camera, settings, and contacts, with more to follow after launch. You can use voice commands to rotate photos, pull up your inbox, and place calls.

Bixby Vision

Bixby Vision is essentially an augmented reality camera with image recognition capabilities, like Google Goggles, that you’ll most likely use to identify products that you want to buy. For instance, you can point it at a bottle of wine to find its price and other neat details like recommended food pairings. Samsung announced that it’s working with Pinterest and Amazon, among other partners to build out uses for Bixby Vision.

Beyond shopping, you can also use it to recognize things in your vicinity, like flowers and trees for instance. At the S8 unveiling on Wednesday, another use case showed a user taking a photo of a landmark and Bixby providing historical information about it as well as local restaurant recommendations.

Bixby Home

Finally, Bixby Home is essentially a vertical pane of “cards” for stuff like weather, controlling smart home devices, news, and fitness tracking. It also links to third party apps like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

There are a lot of open questions about how Bixby will work in the real world, how useful we’ll find it, and how well Samsung improves upon and builds it out in the near future. But for Samsung, there’s no question that a lot is riding on Bixby’s success.