While rumours of the S8 are still milling round, rumours of Bixby has now been confirmed by Samsung. Bixby will be the new “intelligent interface” for Samsung devices, claiming to be “fundamentally different from other voice agents or assistants in the market, [offering] a deeper experience”. Bixby is said to have been designed with artificial intelligence enforced with deep learning concepts.

This is broken down into 3 aspects:

1. Bixby-enabled applications will support almost every  task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface (ie. touch commands), making it more predictable. Samsung notes that existing assistants have a limit to their capability of what could or could not be used on voice commands.
2. For any Bixby-enabled application, users will be able to activate Bixby at any time and it will understand the current context and state of the application, allowing users to carry out current work-in-progress continuously. Samsung touts that for switching between modes, current assistants may either start the entire task over again, losing all the work in progress, or simply not understand the user’s intention.
3. As number of supported commands increase, it can be difficult to remember them all. While other assistant may require exact commands in fixed forms, apparently Bixby can understand commands even if they are incomplete. Otherwise, it will request for additional information.

With Bixby’s design, InJong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services wrote on the post that the interface “must be natural and intuitive enough to flatten the learning curve regardless of the number of functions being added”. It aims to “remove friction” and make it simple and user friendly so it doesn’t require a steep learning curve, encouraging users to adapt to new interface instead of reverting back to old ways of interacting with the phone.