Ever since computers were a thing, we have been fascinated with the idea of interacting with them through voice. Smartphones being the most ubiquitous computing devices are the preferred playground for Intelligent Personal Assistants push.
Google has Google Now and recently Google Assistant, Amazon with Alexa, Microsoft with Cortana and Apple with their famous Siri.
Not to be left out, Samsung introduced the newest entry to this list – their Bixby service – with the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. Marketed as a new way to interact with your phone, Samsung seeks to differentiate their service from the rest by being helper that makes it easy to complete tasks on your device. “Just push the Bixby button.”
They seemed pretty confident with this unveil that they even placed a dedicated physical button on these new devices for Bixby’s quick launch. There has since been a work-around from the folks at XDA to rewire this Bixby button to launch Google Assistant instead.
Right out of the gate, a number of tech commentaries questioned Samsung’s wisdom in developing this service while they could have easily gone with the Google Assistant. LG’s flagship for 2017 the G5 has this option. Since then, Samsung must be realizing how hard it is to implement this voice enabled assistant service as they admitted to The Verge that it will not be ready in time for when the device ships to its US customers on April 21st, 2017. They are instead offering to patch it using a software update later on.
Nevertheless, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ remain the flagship devices to beat in 2017 and are bound to sell in their millions but we will be closely observing how this Bixby service develops and ages.
