It seems like all big tech companies are in an arms race to create the ultimate intelligence. While you probably know of Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistance, from Apple, Microsoft, and Google respectively, there is a new kid on the block Bixby by Samsung.
Though Bixby arrived on the scene earlier this year, it is still a beta program, and Samsung has yet to fully bake this digital assistant to offer formidable competition to the likes of Siri, Cortana, and Google Now. At least not yet anyway, but they are spreading their beta program to more places around the world.
At launch, Bixby was only available in South Korea and later on in the United States. Samsung touts Bixby as superior to other digital assistant application in the market, because (as the company says) it has context awareness and cognitive tolerance. So naturally, that stirred up much interest in this new AI to arrive onto the digital assistance scene.
However, when the product was finally launched to the masses (albeit still in beta) with the Galaxy S8, it was a complete disappointment. Though Samsung did say, they had not yet availed all the features they were talking about.
During its launch (with Galaxy S8) Bixby was able to perform nifty tasks like identifying objects, pull up links from Amazon among others. Nonetheless, it scores low where digital assistance apps are supposed to score big; it does not yet take voice commands.
Now Samsung has availed the app across 200 countries (including Kenya and South Africa) outside South Korea and the U.S. The app still supports just two languages, English (US) and Korean. With the bigger roll out, Samsung has added new features such as quick commands, enabling users to create custom voice commands that can be used in a sequence of one or more commands.
Take, for instance; you can use a voice command “night mode” as a shortcut to instructing Bixby to Turn on the ‘Do not disturb’ mode and set the alarm the next morning at 5 AM.
Samsung says Bixby also understands cross platform commands. The company says you can take a snap and tell Bixby to “send the picture just taken to Mom.” The digital assistant is said to understand cross platform commands and should know which picture you are talking about and the outgoing message you want it to send to mom.
