Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
Samsung calling on developers to join Bixby ecosystem
Chung Eui-suk, executive vice president and head of software and AI at Samsung Electronics, speaks during the Bixby Developer Day conference at the InterContinental Seoul Coex hotel, Tuesday. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
By Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
Samsung Electronics is calling on domestic and overseas software developers to take part in its artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, by developing applications for its Bixby platform. The Korean tech giant made the call at its first ever conference in Seoul for software programmers.
Samsung organized the Bixby Developer Day conference at the InterContinental Seoul Coex hotel, Tuesday, to share the latest developments and features of its Bixby virtual assistant. The firm also showed off the Bixby Developer Studio software toolkit for third-party developers, which it introduced during the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco, Nov. 7 and 8.
Chung Eui-suk, vice president and head of software and AI, emphasized that Samsung aims to have all of its devices equipped with Bixby by 2020.
“This year is an important one for Samsung. We have been trying to develop an intelligent platform and as a result, we were able to install the new Bixby on the Galaxy Note 9 smartphone. Starting this year, we are planning to transform the Bixby assistant to an open platform,” Chung said during a keynote speech.
“Starting with smartphones, every Samsung device ranging from TVs to refrigerators will feature Bixby. To make it easy for developers to come up with Bixby programs in different languages, the kit will support more languages such as British English, German, French and Italian,” said Chung, adding that Samsung will invest $22 billion in fifth-generation (5G) networks and AI by 2020.
Yi Ji-soo, vice president of the AI Strategy Group at Samsung, said the tech industry is in the early phase of a user interaction paradigm shift and the changes will be applied to various devices.
“Over the past 30 years, we have experienced several paradigm shifts such as PCs, web services and smartphones. At first, it was hard to feel the changes but later we realized there had been huge changes from every aspect,” said Yi. “AI will be the same. However, this interactive paradigm shift led by AI technology is not aiming to bring change in specific devices. The concept of the interaction paradigm shift will be applied to various devices. We believe Samsung can make the world's best AI platform that can understand the complexities of coupling each device.”
To be able to create an ecosystem based around Bixby, Yi said the the Bixby Developer Studio offers access to the same software tools that Samsung employees use. “We decided to enable every developer to use the same version of Bixby Developer Studio we use because we want to create an AI era together with our partners,” said Yi.
Adam Cheyer, chief technology officer of Viv Labs, an AI platform firm Samsung acquired in 2016, urged local developers to join the AI ecosystem saying the AI industry was still in its early phase.
“Even though there are number of virtual assistants on the market today, the intelligent assistant market is still very nascent. To put this in perspective, back in 1998, Google was the 14th search engine to enter the market. The intelligent assistant market is still young. It is ready for new ideas and innovation,” said Cheyer. “If you believe in a voice assistant revolution, the time to dive in is now. Developers and brands which make their presence known early in this paradigm will have advantages in the long run.”
The conference also featured local developers who have developed programs for Bixby.
SK Telecom, a telecommunication firm here, introduced an app to activate the firm's mobile navigation service T-Map using the Bixby voice assistant. 10000 Recipe, a local recipe app, also uses Bixby assistant so that people can concentrate on cooking without having to touch the screen to find the instructions. Bugs, an online music streaming app here, showcased its music recommendation feature using Bixby assistant.