Samsung’s Bixby AI expands to more countries
Look out Siri and Alexa, but Samsung says its artificial intelligence (AI) powered Bixby’s voice system has now expanded to more than 200 countries and territories. In addition to South Korea and the US, it is now available in the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa, among others.
As reported in March, Samsung unveiled the AI – with users offered the option to call upon Bixby at any time; and touch or voice commands “at any context of the application will work”.
In the latest announcement, Samsung says Bixby is currently available in US English and Korean, and offers “quick commands”. This latter feature allows users to create a custom voice command to use in place of a sequence of one or more commands. For example, you can use the command “good night” as a shortcut for “turn on do-not-disturb mode, set an alarm for 6:00am and turn on blue light filter”.
Like many others in AI innovation, Samsung says its baby also understands the way you actually speak, ask questions and make requests. For example, if you take a photo and then tell Bixby to “send the picture just taken to Mom,” Bixby understands cross-application commands and will know which photo you are referring to and will text it to your “mom” (or whatever you call her).
Injong Rhee, EVP and head of R&D, software and services of the mobile communications business at Samsung Electronics, says: “The expansion of Bixby’s voice capabilities is an initial step in the continued rollout of Bixby functionality. In the future, Bixby will have the learning power to offer more intelligent and personalised interactions and seamless connections across more devices.”
It doesn’t offer any specifics, but Samsung states that it plans to continue expanding the voice capabilities to additional countries, languages, devices, features and third-party applications.
Starting today (22 August), Galaxy S8 and S8+2 users can enable Bixby’s voice capabilities by pressing the Bixby button to begin onboarding.
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