Samsung Galaxy S8: Bixby could herald the next iPhone moment in the smartphone world

The craze for a smart digital voice assistants did not arrive until Apple brought Siri to the iPhone 4S. While Siri was not exactly the ultimate version of a digital assistant (it still isn’t)

back then, it did, in more ways than one, lay the foundations of what we have come to expect from a voice-based digital assistant today.

So they need to be smart and capable. By that I mean accomplishing certain tasks, checking the weather, booking a cab, do simple calculations and a few other tricks. Oddly even with all the AI brains behind Google’s Assistant, it will still not be able get a slightly smarter request completed. So in short, this is all we have come to expect from voice assistants and as you would already know, it is a bit too limited and not so useful.

Personally, I use Siri only to place a call and nothing else. This is because to do something more, I will have to think for a few seconds and frame my sentence correctly so that I know she will understand my request. The odd bit is that she may not, even with all that effort put in. And this is why I rarely end up using Siri, if not at all.

Voice assistants have gone from ‘cool’ to ‘wow’ and now to ‘boring’, because they simply cannot get the things done the way we want them to be done. Which is basically the things we would need an assistant to get done, when we are out of time, or are simply too lazy to lift a finger.

Booking movie tickets is a great example. Need to book one? Here’s what you’d normally need to do:

1 Power up your phone
2 Open the third-party boking app
3 Find your movie in the list
4 Find the right seats
5 Confirm your tickets
6 Make the payment

After all this, hope that all of it gets done right and that your internet connection does not give way in between.

A smarter voice assistant, like a real one, should be able to do all of the above and just simply confirm that they have been booked.

And this is exactly what Samsung is aiming for with its recently announced Bixby voice assistant. Bixby is different in the way that it works and different from what we have come to expect from digital voice assistants on smartphones these days. While everyone else is banking on AI and framed sentences to get things done right, Samsung is looking at both AI and app integration, to get more things done than ever before.

InJong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services in an official blog post explained how Bixby, is different and how it stands out from the rest.

What Bixby does right

Firstly, the team began with a completely different approach. “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.” said the lengthy post.

In short, Bixby, thanks to its brain wired into its recent acquisition Viv will be able to generate programs in milliseconds. In short, it will write a program for every new task thrown at it, as long as the developer supports it.

Which brings us to the second important aspect, deeper integration. We have seen Apple show off a few things, like booking an Uber using Siri, or even sending a WhatsApp message using Siri. But what if I wanted an Uber for 6 friends? Siri would not understand my request.

And this is where Bixby, with Viv’s brains, is expected to take those digital assistant standards up a notch (make that two).

Bixby, with help from developers, will need a piece of code to be integrated into developers’ apps to make them Bixby compatible. Once compatible, Bixby will be able to literally get anything done within an app. In short, the ticket-booking scenario I mentioned above can be accomplished with a single voice command.

What makes Samsung’s Bixby so impressive is that it does not need the user to learn and comply to a fixed syntax for framing queries. A user also need not be limited by the capabilities of his digital assistant either.

You can have a look at the Viv demo below to see how things would pan out.

Impressed?

You should be. Something smarter and more capable after a 5 year gap should be enough to attract hordes of users to Samsung’s shiny new Galaxy S8. Yes, the Galaxy S8 will come with Samsung’s Bixby and a dedicated Bixby button, which hints at an overlay or a notification-like toast dropdown that will not get in the way of the current task you are working on.

Another detail that just got confirmed is that the S8 smartphone will be a demo platform for things to come, with just the native apps supporting the voice assistant in the flagship smartphone. Once everyone is impressed by its capabilities, it will be up to third-party developers to use the Samsung SDK to make their apps more useful and accessible. It will also make Bixby that much more powerful.

More than just smartphones

And here is where Samsung’s pitch for a voice assistant comes in, something that is well thought off and something only its Korean counterpart LG can pull off.

The company has plans to bring Bixby into its entire consumer appliance range as well (Is it goodbye for Google Home and Amazon Alexa?).

And this is where the broader picture begins to appear. Samsung with Bixby integrated into smartphones, appliances and may be even cars (it recently acquired Harman International Industries for $8 billion) could easily take over Apple with a smarter product.

The day and age of the smartphone is quickly coming to an end, in the sense that only specifications and build quality will not make your phone stand out anymore. And with these consumer products running out of steam, software that connects the dots could be Samsung’s saviour, not just for smartphones, but everything that they plan to build in the near future.

Google could be a bit tough, given its foray into the autonomous driving space, but yes the possibilities for Bixby for now are indeed endless and could completely change the way we interact with our smartphones.

As for smartphones, Samsung with its Bixby and TouchWiz layer could easily result in a stand-alone fork of Android. Something that works only on Samsung smartphones worldwide and unlike Microsoft’s Windows Phone, Samsung has the smartphones sales as proof that things could work out.