Samsung's Bixby Voice capabilities now active in U.S. English

Samsung’s Bixby Voice capabilities now active in U.S. English

In recent times, there has been a lot of development on Bixby. We have earlier reported that Bixby was only good in South Korean language and has struggled to learn other languages. Last week, we also reported that Samsung is set to unveil Bixby in the US. Don’t forget that Bixby was supposed to be launched alongside Samsung’s most recent flagships (Galaxy S8, and Galaxy S8+) which were launched in March this year but apparently, Bixby wasn’t ready for foreign languages at the time of the launch because Samsung was having trouble teaching it multiple languages. Since then, Samsung has worked tirelessly to improve the capabilities of Bixby and today it has made a huge announcement.

Samsung announced today that it is introducing Bixby voice capabilities for U.S. English in the United States and Korea. Bixby serves to make the interaction with your device much easier and faster. You can surf through your smartphone and switch between commands by simply saying so and Bixby will understand.

Bixby can complete simple tasks like turning on the flashlights or taking a selfie and it can also perform complex tasks like reminders and specific photo search. We usually have tons of images in our smartphones and trying to access them after a while could be a truly tedious task. You can simply tell Bixby “find photos I took in Caracas and create an album called ‘Venezuela’ and it will be done. Bixby is designed to power the device, apps, and services thereby making the general control of the smartphone much easier. Bixby voice capabilities will give Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ users an easy way to activate voice commands and getting more done on their phones.

Bixby is fully integrated into the device thus users can swap between voice, touch or text commands which give it an edge over other voice assistants. It will be compatible with most Samsung apps thus whatever you can do by touching or typing will be done with the voice. It is also designed to support select additional native and third-party apps which offer integration with Bixby. These apps will be available via Bixby Labs.

Injong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software, and Services of Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics said

“At Samsung, we are dedicated to creating the best possible user experience for our customers. That’s why we designed Bixby – it’s an intelligent interface that allows you to do more things with your phone. We want to offer a truly multimodal experience, so that users can interact with their phone in many different ways – through sight, touch, typing or voice – all of the most natural ways to interact with the world, available on your smartphone” He added “And as the Bixby ecosystem grows, it will use its completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance to evolve from a smartphone interface to the interface for your life”

Bixby can be activated by pressing the Bixby hardware button which is placed at on the side of the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Alternatively, you can fire Bixby up by simply saying “Hi Bixby” as Bixby understands natural language. The way one talks when he is tired is different from the way he talks when he is excited or just waking up from sleep thus Samsung embedded a deep learning technology in Bixby so that with time, Bixby can learn to recognize users different ways of speaking.

As of now, Bixby is only available in Korean and U.S. English in South Korea and the United States on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Users in the U.S. can use this service immediately but they need to update the app to the latest version. Just like other Samsung services like Samsung Pay which has expanded globally, Bixby is poised to do same.