Samsung Electronics Co on Wednesday announced that it is upgrading its Bixby digital assistant and making it available for a range of connected devices, setting up a clash with Amazon.com Inc’s Alexa and others competing for leadership in artificial intelligence (AI).
The South Korean electronics giant, which is the world’s biggest smartphone maker, launched Bixby last year, but only for its own flagship Galaxy handsets.
The new Bixby 2.0 is to be open to developers in a move to put the personal assistant on more devices, the company said at its developer conference in San Francisco.
“Bixby 2.0 will be ubiquitous, available on any and all devices,” Samsung executive vice president Chung Eui-suk said in a blog post.
“This means that having the intelligence of Bixby, powered by the cloud, act as the control hub of your device ecosystem, including mobile phones, TVs, refrigerators, home speakers, or any other connected technology you can imagine,” Chung said.
The move puts Samsung and Bixby squarely in competition with Alexa, the AI program powering Amazon’s connected speakers and on many third-party devices including appliances and cars.
Also competing in the space are Google and Microsoft Corp, which have their own digital assistants that can be used for smart homes and connected vehicles.
While the first iteration of Bixby drew mixed reviews, Chung said the 2.0 version is to be “a powerful intelligent assistant platform that will bring a connected experience that is ubiquitous, personal and open.”
Chung described Bixby 2.0 as “a fundamental leap forward” for digital assistants.
“Today’s assistants are useful, but ultimately still play a limited role in people’s lives,” Chung said.
“People use them to set timers and reminders, answer trivial questions, etc. We see a world where digital assistants play a bigger role, an intelligent role, where one day everything from our phones, to our fridge, to our sprinkler system will have some sort of intelligence to help us seamlessly interact with all the technology we use each day,” he said.
Speaking at the WSJD Live conference this week, Samsung Next president David Eun said: “When we think about Bixby, we don’t think about it as a voice gateway on a single device. We think of it as a service across all devices in the home — TVs, appliances, even cars.”
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