Forget the foldable phones. Samsung's Bixby assistant is about to become smarter

The Samsung Bixby Digital Assistant boasts an extra capacity, but the question of whether it's too late remains unresolved.

The South Korean company will open Wednesday its two-day conference in San Francisco. The fifth annual conference marks the company's major effort to get developers to create software specifically for their devices. Previously, this meant creating apps that were compatible with Samsung's curved smartphone screens or taking advantage of its S Pen stylus. This year, the focus is on Bixby and artificial intelligence.

While the prospect of a foldable smartphone – The long rumor concerning the Galaxy F – could attract attention to the speech made by Samsung at 10 am in the morning (Paris time), this is a preview of what will happen. The presentation will focus on the present: how to make Bixby smarter. The consumer electronics giant could share more information on the Galaxy Home smart speaker powered by Bixby that it unveiled in August, including its date of sale.

Samsung plans to let all third-party developers exploit Bixby, according to the Wall Street Journal. Soon, companies will be able to make "capsules", similar to the "skills" of Amazon Alexa, to do things like ordering meals using a voice command, the newspaper said.

This decision would respond to the wish that Samsung had made when launching Bixby on the Galaxy S8 in early 2017 and during the unveiling of the 2.0 version of artificial intelligence technology later in the year: open Bixby to third-party applications. The goal is to help Bixby compete with Alexa, Amazon, Apple, Siri and Google Assistant, at a time when digital assistants are raging, allowing you to call an Uber carousel or control your smart home with your voice.

For Samsung and many others, artificial intelligence is the next big wave of computing. All technology heavyweights invest in these assistants because they are presented as the future of how we will interact with our gadgets. The ultimate promise for smart technology is to predict what you want before you even ask, but in most cases, PDAs are not smart enough yet.

The problem for Samsung is that it could be too late.

"They are really far behind," said Jack Narcotta, Analyst at Strategy Analytics. "They could be far enough behind, they might not be able to catch up effectively with any of the market leaders."

According to a poll by Voicebox.AI, only 4% of American adults who use voice assistants on a smartphone use Bixby. That compares to 44% for Apple's Siri, 30% for Google Assistant's help and 17% for Alexa.

Samsung declined to comment before the developer conference.

Bixby is just as bad in smart devices as the phone, such as smart speakers. Despite the fact that it is the largest manufacturer of smartphones and televisions in the world and one of the largest suppliers of household appliances. Overall, Amazon dominates the digital assistant market without nearly a quarter of Americans using it, according to the Ovum Market Study. Samsung hangs out with only 6% absorption.

"Competition in the AI ​​assistants market is heating up," the firm said.

A brilliant acolyte

Samsung has been developing software and service capabilities over the last decade, but has had more failures than successes. Over the years, the company has launched various services, including Bixby's predecessor, S Voice, to remove them a few months or a few years later. Instead of using its local Tizen operating system in its high end smartphones, Samsung has relegated the software to wearables and other products and continues to rely on Android software. Google to power its smartphones and tablets.

While Bixby has its own dedicated button on the side of Galaxy smartphones, Samsung device users can still access the Google Assistant via the Home key. Given the option between Google Assistant and Bixby, many are opting for Google, analysts said.

"Most people are starting to use digital assistants for difficult tasks, such as research," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies. Because that is not why Bixby was built, the results are often disappointing "so that people never come back".

She added that it would be difficult for users to abandon the Google Assistant on a phone, unless Samsung makes the technology difficult to access. "But I would not advise them to do it," she said, "unless [Bixby] is incredibly better. "

By the time Bixby launched more than a year ago, the goal was for technology to act as an "enlightened companion" on smartphones, allowing users to easily and quickly make things like screen capture or find a picture and send it to a friend. It was a new interface, not a full-fledged digital assistant that could tell you what was the height of Abraham Lincoln or the Kansas City capital.

An image recognition component, called Bixby Vision, could identify landmarks, types of wine, products and text to translate. Bixby would tell you what the items were and, in the US, would send you to Amazon to buy them.

At first, Bixby worked with just 10 preloaded Samsung apps. From the beginning, Samsung has announced its intention to let third-party application developers take advantage of Bixby. That's partly why she bought start-up AI Viv Vivs and Joyent, a cloud computing company, in 2016.

Viv was destined to handle daily tasks, such as ordering flowers, booking hotel rooms and finding weather conditions, in response to natural language commands. The creators – including one of Siri's creators, Dag Kittlaus – claim that their software understands your requests and engages in a conversation with you to satisfy them, instead of making you talk about formatted commands, as do other assistants IA.

The initial version of Bixby used only the technology created by Samsung internally. But Bixby 2.0, which Samsung unveiled at its developer conference last year, has incorporated Viv's predictive technology. Launching the Galaxy Note 9 in August, Samsung claims that Bixby 2.0 is smarter than its first version, with deep link capabilities and enhanced natural language capabilities. This helps to better recognize individual users and to better anticipate people's needs.

Over the last year, Samsung has also collaborated with preferred partners on Bixby-based applications, its first step before opening its SDC 2018 software development kit more widely. And Bixby has made its way to the next generation. Samsung's new Samsung Galaxy Watch 2018. and the Family Hub refrigerator from the company.

Gradually, Bixby became more than a smart sidekick.

"Now, it's not enough to be different [user interface] assistant, "said Milanesi. It 's about being a full – fledged assistant. "

A smart future

If Bixby's capabilities are being developed by Samsung, it would be best to focus on specific uses rather than everyone else, analysts said. This could mean targeting the automobile through its Harman business, which is a key supplier of the automobile. Or he could focus on devices, languages ​​or other areas, has an edge over his competitors, said Blake Kozak, an analyst at IHS Markit.

"Samsung is probably too late in the market to compete with the infrastructure and scale of Google and Amazon," he said. "Instead of [it] should become a specialist, or at least the de facto standard for Samsung devices. "

Samsung also needs to create several versions of its Galaxy Home speaker, according to analysts. Its first version may be expensive, but it should also produce cheaper versions that cost less than $ 40 and are expensive enough to compete with Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home.

Even though he may be late, Samsung is not giving up on Bixby. Over the past year, the company has opened seven AI research centers around the world, including the United States, South Korea and Russia, to make its digital assistant more intelligent. It plans to employ 1,000 artificial intelligence specialists by 2020 – the same schedule that has been applied for all of its products to be connected to the Internet and integrated with Bixby.

"We are an appliance company," said Kim Hyun-suk, CEO of Samsung Consumer Electronics in May. "The rules of the game are different – it's not fair to see it as a matter of being ahead or late."

Overall, Samsung "aims to develop a highly personalized multi-device platform that allows users to achieve more in their lives," said the group in a press release announcing the creation of a new technology center. IA in October.

Now, it only remains to be hoped that developers – and users – will commit.

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