One of Samsung’s employees seemingly confirmed that the Galaxy S8 will ship with an artificial intelligence assistant. An industry insider Roland Quandt recently took to Twitter to share a screenshot depicting the header of a LinkedIn profile belonging to an unnamed Principal Program Manager at Samsung Electronics. Among other things, their job description says how they’re responsible to “drive the execution and delivery for Samsung’s upcoming AI (artificial intelligence) assistant on the Galaxy S8.” The screenshot that can be seen below provides no further info on the Galaxy S8 and its AI assistant. The source apparently worked at Samsung’s Big Data, Intelligence, and Mobile divisions for the last year but their LinkedIn profile isn’t publicly available. Regardless, this latest turn of events only adds more weight to numerous reports about Samsung’s upcoming answer to Google Assistant and Siri.
Samsung has long been rumored to be developing a voice-controlled AI assistant called Bixby. The company recently filed for a variety of trademarks mentioning Bixby in connection to various types of voice-enabled software and has already accidentally confirmed the existence of Bixby earlier this month. Bixby is said to be a highly advanced digital assistant developed by an AI startup Viv which Samsung acquired in October for an undisclosed sum. Recent rumors suggest that Bixby will be integrated into all default apps on the Galaxy S8 and will even be able to perform a visual search to identify and analyze its surroundings. The assistant is said to debut with Samsung’s upcoming flagship but several of Samsung’s recent trademark filings suggest that the South Korean tech giant is also considering integrating Bixby into other smartphones, tablets, and even Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Samsung is expected to unveil Bixby along with the Galaxy S8 in the coming weeks. The Seoul-based consumer electronics manufacturer will likely be skipping MWC 2017 as the company reportedly decided to hold a special unveil event for the Galaxy S8 in New York City. The event is allegedly scheduled for either late March or April, while the phone itself should be hitting the shelves by mid-April. Given how the Galaxy S8 is one of the most anticipated Android flagships of the year, more information will likely follow soon one way or another.