Samsung Electronics has announced that Bixby’s voice capabilities have expanded to more than 200 countries worldwide, allowing millions of consumers to experience a smarter way to interact with their phones.
In addition to South Korea and the United States, consumers in countries across the Middle East and North Africa, including Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, will be able to utilize the intelligent interface to help them get things done faster and easier.
Currently available in US English and Korean, Bixby brings enhanced smartphone productivity and personalization through Quick Commands, a feature that allows you to easily create a custom voice command to use in place of a sequence of one or more commands. For example, you can use the command “good night” as a shortcut for “Turn on silent mode, set an alarm for 6:00 AM and turn on blue light filter.”
Bixby also understands the way you actually speak, ask questions and make requests. For example, if you take a photo and then tell Bixby to “send the picture just taken to Mom,” Bixby understand cross-application commands and will know which photo you are referring to and will text it to your mom. This natural language understanding makes interacting with your smartphone easier and more intuitive. With its iterative deep learning technology, Bixby will improve over time to recognize your personal preferences and ways of speaking.
Bixby is unique in that it is an intelligent interface, rather than a standalone app. When an application becomes Bixby-enabled, Bixby will support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using voice, touch or text. Bixby’s deep integration is also built into the smartphone settings so that you can change phone options– such as setting the screen timeout or showing all notifications– without interrupting what you are currently doing.
“Now millions of customers worldwide have access to a new and intelligent way of interacting with their phone,” said Injong Rhee, executive vice president and head of R&D, Software and Services of the Mobile Communications Business at Samsung Electronics.
“The expansion of Bixby’s voice capabilities is an initial step in the continued rollout of Bixby functionality. In the future, Bixby will have the learning power to offer more intelligent and personalized interactions and seamless connections across more devices.”
Samsung plans to continue expanding Bixby’s voice capabilities to additional countries, languages, devices, features and third-party applications. By further enhancing its mobile experience and solutions offerings, even more users can interact with their device and manage their apps and services more seamlessly and instinctively.
Starting today, Galaxy S8 and S8+2 users can enable Bixby’s voice capabilities by pressing the Bixby button to begin onboarding. You can now activate Bixby by holding the dedicated button on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ phones, or by simply saying, “Hi, Bixby.”
Bixby is currently available on select devices, including the Galaxy S8 and S8+, a statement said, adding that service availabilities and third party partners are varied in each country.