O (very attractive) Galaxy S8, it seems, to be officially presented only next week. However, whether due to some mysterious marketing strategy or the fact that the device has already leaked left and right in the four corners of the internet, Samsung decided to advance in one week the official presentation of what should be the biggest differential of its new flagship and a product that will certainly dictate the direction of the South Korean brand going forward.
I'm talking, of course, about Bixby, which joins the list of virtual assistants all still female by default where they already sit comfortably at Google Assistant, a Alexa, a Cortana and our old acquaintance Crab. The latter, in fact, has an amazing blood bond with Samsung's new daughter: Siri's creative team started to develop another virtual assistant after leaving Apple, eventually named Viv. Because the South Korean giant acquired Viv last year and incorporated a good part of its technologies with some own ideas and others already existing in the forgotten S Voice, spawning the new strangely British name assistant.
We still don't have a demonstration of Bixby in the real world, this probably only happens in the Galaxy S8 ad, but on paper things look very promising. Samsung promises a new assistant that will triumph over competition on three counts: completeness, in the sense that, once an application starts offering Bixby support, basically all its operations can be performed by the user with the voice (instead of some pre-defined options); O sense of context, meaning that the assistant knows exactly what the user is doing at the moment even before he makes his request and allows a more integrated workflow; and, finally, the cognitive tolerance, which allows Bixby to understand inaccurate or incomplete commands and allows natural user interaction with the machine.
It is true that Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have promised this before and only partially fulfilled it, but it is very much in Samsung's favor that the Viv demonstrations showed a really impressive, smart and well-finished product. In addition, the South Korean's enthusiasm for her new assistant is also a sign that things are looking promising so much that the Galaxy S8 (and possibly all smartphones equipped with Bixby from now on) come with a button physical dedicated to it, for instant operations at any time.
There is certainly no lack of ambience in Samsung, which, in its presentation text, states that Bixby will soon equip all the equipment in your home, allowing total home control through the user's voice. Undoubtedly an idea quite similar to the one that Apple has had for Siri for some years with mixed results, admittedly.
The fact: in this fight of sisters, the winner will certainly emerge after a long maturation of the technologies of both. Who will be Ruth and who will be Rachel in this whole story? Well, that's just the time.
(via iDownloadBlog)
