We reported a few days ago that Galaxy S8 customers in the US will be getting an early preview of Bixby’s voice commands before its global rollout. Samsung has now started rolling out the preview to those who registered for the early access and it seems that there are a lot of bugs accompanying the voice command update.
A YouTube video from The Verge shows Bixby chit-chatting like Google’s Assistant. This early Beta version seems to be doing good, working for 70 percent of the times. Bixby can be enabled from the home screen by saying “Hi Bixby” or holding down the dedicated Bixby button. Once Bixby appears as a floating window, the user can have Bixby on a full-screen interface, similar to existing voice assistants. The video shows that Bixby works well for simple voice-based queries like weather enquiry or time of a particular place. It was also able to reduce the brightness with a voice command as well as take a selfie, all through voice commands. Samsung says that there are 3,000 activities that Bixby can do if it's related to the device.
However, Bixby still requires a lot of refinement. The response time is slow when compared to Google’s Assistant. For any device based function, the app goes through the menus and windows before doing a particular activity in an app. For activities that aren’t related to the device, Bixby prefers opening the Google Search for answers. Certain commands need to give in a particular phrase, for instance, the messaging commands. Also, Bixby is only comfortable with Samsung apps and few prominent third-party apps.
That said, Bixby is shaping up to be a powerful assistant than Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. It has access to particular functions of an app, which makes it extremely helpful and justifies the existence of voice assistants. To improve on that, Samsung is relying heavily on user feedback, with satisfaction prompts after every function. There’s even an XP based points system that tells you how much have you been using Bixby during the period; more XP will unlock new themes and background colours.
Samsung said that Bixby is supposed to be different from existing AI assistants and we are already seeing some of it turning into reality. We only hope that Samsung irons out the bugs from Bixby as soon as possible to make it a shining example of voice assistant.
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