A lot is in store for Samsung's proprietary digital assistant. Though a great number of Samsung mobile phone owners would rather have Bixby completely out of their lives, it's clear Samsung has bigger plans.
Besides the budget Galaxy Home speculated to come out this year, the company is aiming to widen Bixby's reach even further with new partners, including Google and other major tech companies. Bixby will be more integrated into Samsung's other products as well, including its 2019 QLED TVs and range of smart appliances such as refrigerators, washers, and artificial intelligence-powered speakers.
Google Is Coming To Bixby
Such initiatives should perhaps come as no surprise. The company has long been pushing to make its digital assistant a central point of its product ecosystem, for one.
Google coming onboard is the real surprising tidbit here, especially since supporting a rival assistant feels a bit counterintuitive if Google intends to remain as the top dog of voice interfaces.
Thankfully, Google is putting its generosity cap on and is committing to porting some of its most important apps over to Bixby, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and even Google Play.
"Bixby started as a smarter way to use your Galaxy phone," Samsung said in a statement. "Today, it is evolving to become a scalable, open AI platform that will support more and more devices."
Samsung Bixby
If not for the fact that it comes preinstalled on Samsung's newest phones, Bixby would have probably ended up a desolated service. Although in itself the digital assistant is promising, it has failed to gain significant traction for a number of reasons, chief of which is the fact that people are less willing to commit to a new voice ecosystem when there are a lot of excellent ones already available.
With context-aware responses, image recognition, and a slew of other impressive tricks, Google Assistant remains the subjective best out of all candidates, and it only gets better each year. Needless to say Bixby has its work cut out for it.
Samsung has been hard at work trying to carve out a bit of momentum for its fledgling little assistant, and this boost from Google and other developers should help steer it toward more stable shores.
As with anything in technology, it's hard to predict whether Bixby will be adopted by a lot more people thanks to these new planned integrations. What's clear is Samsung is far from giving up on this front, so expect Bixby to remain a competitor in the rapidly growing arena of voice assistants.
