Samsung has announced the launch of Bixby, its first voice interface with Artificial Intellingence (A.I.). It is called Bixby and InJong Rhee (Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services at Samsung) explains that it soon will become not only the voice interface in Samsung smartphones (Samsung Galaxy 8), but in all Samsung household appliances, even in devices manufactured by other brands.
“Bixby is at the heart of our software and services evolution as a company,” Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services at Samsung underscores, “We are fundamentally and conceptually changing our attitude toward software and services and working hard on innovation throughout all aspects of our mobile ecosystem. Our investment in engineering resources speaks for itself. We have thousands of software developers supporting this effort. This is something that I’m very excited about. Innovating in software and services enables opportunities for creativity and the ability to build new experiences from the ground up. With the continued investment from Samsung on artificial intelligence, the possibility of what Bixby can become is endless.”
The machine learns how to understand you, not the contrary
Technology is supposed to make life easier, but as the capabilities of machines such as smartphones, PCs, home appliances and IoT devices become more diverse, the interfaces on these devices are becoming too complicated for users to take advantage of many of these functions conveniently. User interface designers have to make tradeoff decisions to cram many functions into a small screen or bury them deeper in layers of menu trees. Ultimately users are at the mercy of the designers with an increasingly steep curve that makes learning a new device difficult. This is the fundamental limitation of the current human-to-machine interface. “Since Samsung makes millions of devices, this problem impacts the core of our business,” Rhee explains.
And he continues, “Samsung has a conceptually new philosophy to the problem: instead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world (a reflection of the abilities of designers), it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to us. The interface must be natural and intuitive enough to flatten the learning curve regardless of the number of functions being added.”
Cloud based and open for the use in not Samsung branded devices
“Starting with our smartphones, Bixby will be gradually applied to all our appliances,” Rhee says. “In the future you would be able to control your air conditioner or TV through Bixby. Since Bixby will be implemented in the cloud, as long as a device has an internet connection and simple circuitry to receive voice inputs, it will be able to connect with Bixby. As the Bixby ecosystem grows, we believe Bixby will evolve from a smartphone interface to an interface for your life.”
At the launch of the Galaxy S8, a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled. This set will continue to expand over time. “Our plan is to eventually release a tool (in SDK) to enable third-party developers to make their applications and services Bixby-enabled easily,”he advanced.
Flexible assistant meant to provide a smooth transition to the voice interface
What makes Bixby frundamentally different from other voice agents or assistants in the market, is that Bixby offers a deeper experience thanks to proficiency in three fields: Completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance.
Completeness.- When an application becomes Bixby-enabled, Bixby will be able to support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface (ie. touch commands). Most existing agents currently support only a few selected tasks for an application and therefore confuse users about what works or what doesn’t work by voice command. The completeness property of Bixby will simplify user education on the capability of the agent, making the behaviors of the agent much more predictable.
Context Awareness.-When using a Bixby-enabled application, users will be able to call upon Bixby at any time and it will understand the current context and state of the application and will allow users to carry out the current work-in-progress continuously. Bixby will allow users to weave various modes of interactions including touch or voice at any context of the application, whichever they feel is most comfortable and intuitive. Most existing agents completely dictate the interaction modality and, when switching among the modes, may either start the entire task over again, losing all the work in progress, or simply not understand the user’s intention.
Cognitive Tolerance.- When the number of supported voice commands gets larger, most users are cognitively challenged to remember the exact form of the voice commands. Most agents require users to state the exact commands in a set of fixed forms. Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the commanded task to the best of its knowledge, and then will prompt users to provide more information and take the execution of the task in piecemeal. This makes the interface much more natural and easier to use.
Another example of making easier the use of the voice assistant is the dedicated Bixby button that will be located on the side of the next Samsung galaxy 8.
Instead of taking multiple steps to make a call (turning on and unlocking the phone, looking for the phone application, clicking on the contact bar to search for the person that one is trying to call and pressing the phone icon to start dialing), users will be able to do all these steps with one push of the Bixby button and a simple command.
Image over the headline.- InJong Rhee (Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services at Samsung). © Samsung
