Samsung has launched its ‘Bixby’ user interface for smartphones. Bixby uses artificial intelligence, reinforcing deep learning concepts to the core of Samsung’s user interface designs, according to the company. Bixby will be a new intelligent interface on Samsung devices.
Bixby offers a deeper experience due to proficiency in three properties: completeness, context awareness, and cognitive tolerance. According to Samsung, 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). The completeness property of Bixby is designed to simplify user education on the capability of the agent, making the behaviors of the agent much more predictable.
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.
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. Samsung says its Bixby platform is designed 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 complete the execution of the task.
Samsung has also announced it will include a dedicated Bixby button on the side of its next device. For example, 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 to call and pressing the phone icon to start dialing – customers will be able to do all these steps with one push of the Bixby button and a command.
At the launch of the Galaxy S8, a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled. This set will continue to expand over time, Samsung also said. The company plans to eventually release a tool (in SDK) to enable third-party developers to make their applications and services Bixby-enabled.
Starting with its smartphones, Bixby will be gradually applied to all Samsung appliances. In the future customers are expected to be able to control their 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.
