When the Samsung Galaxy S8 has announced din April, it caught the attention of the world with its gorgeous looks, incredible specifications and a slick software. One feature that was supposed to be a major highlight at the time of launch was Samsung’s own AI assistant – Bixby. Bixby was debuted as a utility with calendar and memo functions, even though Samsung promised it as a full-blown rival to Google Assistant. Now though, it seems that Samsung is closer to deliver its promise.
Samsung has announced its decision to get Bixby voice commands working in the US, albeit with a catch. Bixby’s voice recognition capability will be available only as a preview for now to the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ customers. That means that only a selected few will be able to get a glimpse of Samsung’s software marvel before its official launch in the US sometime later in the year.
To recall, Samsung got Bixby’s voice recognition working for the Korean market last month. It is now known that Bixby can do much more than just keeping being a calendar or memo taking app. It can play songs, narrate a poem, do a custom rap song and much more. Samsung says that Bixby will be able to have a better control over apps and local devices than existing AI assistants. For example, users can ask Bixby to click a photo and send it to someone without touching the screen. That’s something that existing assistant software lack.
However, Samsung announced a few days back that Bixby was having trouble in learning the English language and it would be taking some time before it would start having conversations with existing Bixby-supported handsets. There has been no word on the roll-out of the preview in the Indian market, one of the largest markets for Samsung with a considerable number of Galaxy S8 handsets out in the wild.
If you want to register for the early access, you can do it from here.
