Competition heats up among virtual assistants, as Bixby comes to India

Whether it’s Apple’s Siri or Google’s virtual assistant, they are all becoming a major feature for smartphone users, to add to the battle of virtual assistants, Samsung launched Bixby voice capabilities in India today, allowing consumers to interact with their smartphones using voice commands.

Bixby, which was launched across several US and European markets earlier this year, offers four essential features to customers - the ability to talk to Bixby, take pictures, use it to set reminders, and receive recommendations for products, foods, and things to read plus the virtual assistant offers "Quick Commands", a feature that allows customers to create a custom voice command to use in place of a sequence of one or more commands. For example, one can use the command “good night” as a shortcut for “Turn on Do-not-disturb mode, set an alarm for 6:00 AM and turn on the blue light filter.”


The development of Bixby voice capabilities for Indian consumers was carried out at Samsung Research & Development Institute, Bangalore (SRI-B), Samsung’s largest R&D facility outside Korea. According to Samsung, Bixby has been optimized to understand Indian accents.


Samsung claims that Bixby understands the way users actually speak, ask questions and make requests. For example, if users take a photo and then tell Bixby to “send the picture just taken to Mom”, Bixby will understand the cross-application command and will know which photo the user is referring to and will send the required text. As is the case with all virtual assistants, Bixby will improve over time to recognize your personal preferences and ways of speaking.

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.

However unlike Siri and Google, Bixby will be available only with a couple of high end Samsung phones like the newly launched Samsung Galaxy Note8, Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+1 users can enable Bixby’s voice capabilities in US English by pressing the Bixby button. Consumers can activate Bixby by holding the dedicated button on the Galaxy Note8, Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones, or by simply saying, “Hi, Bixby.”