The Bixby AI assistant that is supposed to make its debut with the Samsung Galaxy S8 this month has just received a guaranteed status. In fact, the confirmation has come from the company itself, though it might have been somewhat unintentional.
The name Bixby finds clear mention on Samsung‘s official Italian page, along with some of its functionalities. The latter has obviously not been shed a great amount of light on just yet, but whatever description the South Korean conglomerate has put up ensures that Bixby is an ambitious function. This makes sense, as Samsung is clearly trying to up their game to be on top of other existing mobile AI features on the market, especially Apple’s Siri. But tech analysts have already predicted a whole new bunch of upgrades that could make their way into Siri in 2017, so Samsung has a lot to live up to.
The keen-eyed people over at 9to5Google are to be credited for the discovery. The Italian privacy page is chock full of information that does not sound too interesting, so you have to scroll down quite a bit to find the term Bixby located unassumingly under the Voice Services section. There is no specific mention of the Samsung Galaxy S8 in the matter, but it almost seems like a no-brainer. There are also a few things worthy of note here.
To sum up the translated version of what is written on the page, the user can use the S Voice service to get quick access to a few functions, such as turning on the music or conducting hassle free internet searches depending on the area that they are based in. But then what follows is this excerpt: “In addition, you can control all operations with the touch interface using voice commands with Bixby.”
What is to be understood from this is that Bixby will operate in conjunction with S Voice to perform all the functions that can be performed using the touch UI. And if that really is the case, then the Samsung Galaxy S8’s Bixby assistant could be unparalleled. Of course, there isn’t much else to find on the page about the cool new function, but more will be known when Samsung finally announces the Galaxy S8 on March 29.