In a bid to better compete with Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa, Samsung has debuted an upgraded version of its voice assistant, Bixby, which is specially geared towards smart home devices.
The revamped second generation of its digital voice assistant – named ‘Bixby 2.0’ – means Samsung is better positioned to compete with Google and Amazon’s offerings, who are seeing to ‘lock’ customers into their own hardware and software families.
The company states Bixby 2.0 will be better at processing the spoken language and predicting an individual’s needs, irrespective of which device it is used on.
Samsung states Bixby 2.0 will “act as the control hub of your device ecosystem”.
Bixby will extend to a plethora of home devices; from phones to TVs, and speakers to fridges.
Like its Alexa and Google Assistant rivals, Bixby 2.0 will now be open to third-party developers, to build and plug in existing services and apps.
From today, Bixby’s new software development kit will be open to developers in beta.
Starting in the US and Korea, Bixby is also rolling out to Samsung TVs.
Bixby first debuted on Samsung’s Galaxy S8, however, consumers have largely not taken to the software – Samsung was forced to disable its dedicated Bixby button on the most recent Galaxy devices, following user frustration when accidentally triggering it.
Samsung still won’t let users remap to something else, like Google Assistant.
Time will tell whether Samsung’s revamped voice assistant, now benefited from third party developer support – will be better received by consumers.
