Samsung Malaysia Electronics today announced that Bixby’s voice capabilities have expanded to over 200 countries and territories worldwide, allowing millions of consumers to experience a smarter way of interacting with their smartphones. In addition to South Korea and the United States, consumers in countries across the world, now including the U.K., Australia, Canada and South Africa, will be able to utilize Bixby’s intelligent interface to help them get things done quickly and smoothly.
Currently available in U.S. English and Korean, Bixby’s voice capabilities
Currently available in U.S. English and Korean1, Bixby brings enhanced smartphone productivity and personalization through Quick Commands, a feature that allows users to easily create a custom voice command to use in place of a sequence of one or more commands. For example, users 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 blue light filter.”
Help you get more out of your connected devices
Bixby also understands and recognizes speaking patterns, questions and requests. For example, you take a picture and request Bixby to “send the recent picture taken to Mom.” Through cross-application commands, Bixby will acknowledge and understand which picture you are referring to and proceed to send 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 personal preferences and way 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 allowing comfortable adjustments to be made – 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 smartphones,” 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’s 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 further expand Bixby’s voice capabilities, far stretching multiple countries, languages, devices, features and third-party applications. By further enhancing its mobile experience and offering solutions, 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.”
For more information on getting things done daily with Bixby, please visit:
http://www.samsung.com/my/apps/bixby/ or
https://news.samsung.com/global/how-to-get-more-done-in-your-day-with-bixby
1Voice command recognizes English (US) and Korean. Not all accents, dialects and expressions recognized. Service ability may vary by country or carrier. Natural language understanding allows Bixby to continuously improve its ability to interpret regional dialects. But, since Bixby learns more frequently used command terms more quickly, it will take more time for Bixby to fully understand regional dialects that are used less frequently.
2Bixby is currently available on select devices, including the Galaxy S8 and S8+.
3Service availabilities and third party partners are varied in each country.