Samsung plans to give its oft-maligned Bixby personal assistant an AI makeover, according to one executive.
It’s fair to say that Samsung’s personal assistant has never been loved or acknowledged to anything like the same extent as an Alexa or a Siri.
With Samsung leaning hard on Google’s suite of AI tools in its current One UI 6.1 software, some have speculated that Bixby’s days might be numbered. Surely Samsung will just go all in with Google’s Gemini generative AI tools and be done with it.
Not so, according to Samsung executive Won-joon Choi. Speaking to CNBC, the executive vice president at Samsung’s mobile business said: “With the emergence of generative AI and LLM (large language model) technology, I believe that we have to redefine the role of the Bixby, so that Bixby could be equipped with generative AI and become more smarter in the future”.
No timeline was given for the installation of these generative AI features, only that Samsung was “working hard” on a solution.
Of course, Google isn’t Samsung’s biggest rival in the smartphone space – Apple is. Given that Apple is tipped to give its similarly dim Siri personal assistant a big AI upgrade at WWDC 2024 in June, Samsung likely feels that it’s obliged to make an effort to match it feature for feature.
Perhaps Samsung phone users should all be keeping that power button press-and-hold shortcut mapped to Bixby after all. It might just be getting a lot more useful.
