Samsung has announced that it is rolling out Bixby’s voice capabilities to over 200 countries, including the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa. The feature was earlier available only in South Korea and United States. The AI-based assistant is currently only available in US English and Korean. To recall, Bixby was unveiled alongside the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+, but the voice feature was not available at the time. The launch of voice commands comes just a day before the company is scheduled to launch its Galaxy Note 8 smartphone.
“Now millions of customers worldwide have access to a new and intelligent way of interacting with their phone,” stated Injong Rhee, Executive Vice President and Head of R&D, Software and Services of the Mobile Communications Business at Samsung Electronics. “The expansion of Bixby’s voice capabilities is an initial step in the continued rollout of Bixby functionality. In the future, Bixby will have the learning power to offer more intelligent and personalized interactions and seamless connections across more devices.”
The company notes that users will be able to create custom commands through a feature called Quick Commands. This lets users set a single command for doing multiple takes. For example. Users could simply say “good night” instead of “Turn on Do-not-disturb mode, set an alarm for 6:00 AM and turn on blue light filter.” Bixby would also understands natural speech patterns including asking questions and making requests. So if a user asks the assistant to “send the picture just taken to mom,” it would understand which photo the user is referring to send that to their mother.