Bixby is Samsung’s AI-powered virtual assistant that made its debut on the Galaxy S8/S8+ two years back. Since then, it has gradually become a staple feature in most Galaxy smartphones and even expanded to other product categories such as wearables, tablets, smart TVs, select refrigerators, and more from the company.
Though Bixby is still nowhere as good as the Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, Samsung has made some progress in the last couple of years. The company made Bixby available in more regions and languages along with bringing it to more Samsung devices. It also introduced the Bixby Developer Studio to allow third-party developers to create Bixby capsules and then launched the Bixby Marketplace for users to download these capsules.
At the ongoing Samsung Developer Conference in San Jose, the Korean company announced new Bixby tools and enhancements to attract more developers. Primary among these is the introduction of Bixby Templates to enable developers to create new capsules easily by simply choosing from a variety of templates available in the Bixby Developer Studio rather than creating everything from scratch.
Samsung is making the discovery of capsules easier as well through Natural Language Categories, allowing users to search and access capsules without invoking the exact capsule name. In addition to all of this, Bixby Marketplace will expand to devices beyond smartphones beginning next year. To help developers create capsules with consistent user interface designs across all its Bixby-powered devices, the company is introducing a new Bixby Views function in the Bixby Developer Studio.
It’s clear Samsung is putting a lot of efforts into Bixby, but there is still a long way to go before it turns into a successful AI platform. You can check the company’s infographic below to trace the evolution of Bixby so far.
