Samsung has decided to further delay it’s English language-based Bixby. This comes as a blow even as the South Korean company was looking to ward off the previous debacles and was also looking forward to the launch of the new Bixby AI-based assistant. Bixby was rolled out with great fanfare even amidst the debacle of the Galaxy Note 7 device last year. Now, the delay might prove to be even more costly.
Samsung has till now released only the Bixby version with support for the Korean language. Since this company is based out of South Korea, this was an accepted issue. However, when Bixby was initially shipped to the consumers, there was a great disappointment when it was later found to not support English. Interestingly, when the new Bixby AI was first declared for global consumption, it was to have four main features: Vision, Remind, Home, and Voice. Of these, the last feature is still not available in English.
This report in the Korea Herald has quoted a Samsung spokesperson who stated,“Developing Bixby in other languages is taking more time than we expected mainly because of the lack of the accumulation of big data,”. You can access the full report here. Also, there are obstacles in the new Data Mining survey also. Besides, we have already heard of the fact that the communication between the English engineering team and the team in Korea is slow, if not almost down to a trickle.
There are a lot of other difficulties as well. When, in last October, Samsung had acquired Viv Labs, founded by members who worked on Apple’s Siri as well, it was thought that the new AI-based assistant would be a great one. Now that Samsung can finally use Viv Lab’s AI in Bixby, it is almost past the horizon. Still, the lack of the English-based Bixby is disappointing.