Bixby Voice released for Galaxy S8 smartphones

A user demonstrates the voice-recognition feature of Samsung Electronics' digital assistant service Bixby using a Galaxy S8 smartphone. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics

By Yoon Sung-won

Samsung Electronics launched the Korean voice-recognition service for its digital assistant Bixby on the Galaxy S8 smartphone series, Friday.

The world's largest smartphone maker said the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant will soon support languages other than Korean, including English, Chinese and Spanish. Samsung Electronics mobile chief Koh Dong-jin had said earlier that Bixby would start supporting English at the end of this month and Chinese in June.

"Based on the deep learning-based AI, Bixby is an intelligent interface that evolves itself through more use," Samsung Electronics said in a statement, Monday. "It will provide different services compared to other search-based AI assistants."

The digital assistant feature was released alongside the S8 smartphones rolled out on April 21. But it was an imperfect version because the voice-recognition feature was not available at that time.

Expectations are high that Samsung Electronics will be able to prove the competitiveness of its digital assistant service over others such as Google's Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri.

According to Samsung Electronics, the Bixby Voice feature is currently compatible with 10 applications of the S8 and S8 Plus smartphones such as gallery, calculator, weather, reminder, message, clock, voice call and camera.

Users can give verbal orders to change settings, sort photos and bookmark webpages, the company said.

It also added what it calls Bixby Labs to test the compatibility of more diverse apps including the mobile payment service, Samsung Pay, Facebook, YouTube and Korea's most-used mobile messenger Kakao Talk.

To access the Bixby Voice feature, users can either press a dedicated button on the left side of the handset or just call "Bixby," before giving a verbal order to the digital assistant.

"More than 3,000 tasks can be done through Bixby Voice," the company said.

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