Seoul, March 21, 2017: Samsung has announced the launch of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted digital assistant, ‘ Bixby’.
It said in a statement that Samsung had employed AI, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of its user interface designs, and Bixby was the ongoing result of this effort.
Bixby will be a new intelligent interface on Samsung devices. The company claimed it would be fundamentally different from other voice agents or assistants in the market, Bixby, it said, offered “a deeper experience” thanks to proficiency in these three properties:
1. Completeness
When an application becomes Bixby-enabled, Bixby will be able to support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface (ie. touch commands). Most existing agents currently support only a few selected tasks for an application and therefore confuse users about what works or what doesn’t work by voice command. The completeness property of Bixby will simplify user education on the capability of the agent, making the behaviors of the agent much more predictable.
2. Context Awareness
When using a Bixby-enabled application, users will be able to call upon Bixby at any time and it will understand the current context and state of the application and will allow users to carry out the current work-in-progress continuously. Bixby will allow users to weave various modes of interactions including touch or voice at any context of the application, whichever they feel is most comfortable and intuitive. Most existing agents completely dictate the interaction modality and, when switching among the modes, may either start the entire task over again, losing all the work in progress, or simply not understand the user’s intention.
3. Cognitive Tolerance
When the number of supported voice commands gets larger, most users are cognitively challenged to remember the exact form of the voice commands. Most agents require users to state the exact commands in a set of fixed forms. Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the commanded task to the best of its knowledge, and then will prompt users to provide more information and take the execution of the task in piecemeal. This makes the interface much more natural and easier to use.
There will be a dedicated Bixby button that will be located on the side of the next Samsung device. Instead of taking multiple steps to make a call – turning on and unlocking the phone, looking for the phone application, clicking on the contact bar to search for the person that you’re trying to call and pressing the phone icon to start dialing – you will be able to do all these steps with one push of the Bixby button and a simple command, said the statement.
Starting with smartphones, Bixby will be gradually applied to all Samsung appliances. In the future, consumers will be able to control their air conditioner or TV through Bixby. Since Bixby will be implemented in the Cloud, as long as a device has an Internet connection and simple circuitry to receive voice inputs, it will be able to connect with Bixby.