Samsung presents its (very) promising assistant Bixby

It will be "fundamentally different" from other voice assistants, promises Samsung: Bixby will be integrated into the future Galaxy S8.

And if Samsung was to forget all the couacs of recent months with a single product, what's more that would not be the long awaited Galaxy S8? And if Bixby, his future virtual assistant, was finally the sensation of the beginning of the year?

In any case the South Korean manufacturer seems to believe. In a long presentation text, the director of R & D software and services InJong Rhee describes what Bixby will be. On the other hand, we are not entitled to a picture or any preview. His imagination must be allowed to conceptualise the "new philosophy" of the constructor: "Rather than humans learn how machines interact with the world, it is the machines that must learn and adapt to us."



Three fundamental properties
Bixby would therefore be "fundamentally different" from the other vocal assistants on the market. Remember that Viv, originally Siri used by Apple, has been working on Bixby for several years and on three properties to start with completeness in the sense that from the moment an application is compatible, the wizard Will be able to support all of its functions.

The second property is "contextual consciousness". Samsung explains that when the user uses Bixby, Bixby will understand the context of the application and its state at a time T. "Most current agents completely impose the interaction mode and when you switch modes, To repeat a task from the beginning thus losing all the work done previously, or even without understanding the user's request at all, "wrote InJong Rhee.

Finally the third property is called "cognitive tolerance", and seems to be the most impressive and useful. Samsung explains that current agents recognize voice commands that are always the same, pronounced correctly. Bixby would be able to adapt this. That is to say, concretely, to adapt and understand what the user means. From an order "calls mom" he can understand "passes a phone call to my mother" for example. This functionality, which of course requires to be tested in real conditions, is indeed an immense field of improvement that remains to be covered: it concerns in fact the adoption of a "natural" interface for the human users that we are.

The interface for your life

We talked about it at the beginning of February, it is now confirmed: the Galaxy S8, as well as future devices (from smartphones to electrical appliances through a wide range of connected products!), Will carry a physical button dedicated to Bixby. "We are bold in our ambition to revolutionize the human-machine interface, but this vision can not be realized overnight. Ambition takes time, "says InJong Rhee.

During the launch, several preinstalled applications will be compatible with Bixby. And Samsung could "potentially" offer a tool to third parties to integrate Bixby into their applications and services. It would be surprising if he did not do so to the extent that Samsung's ambition is to make Bixby "the interface for your life".