S Voice could be the backbone for Samsung’s Bixby assistant according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal. While it was originally thought that Bixby might utilize the technology from Samsung’s recent company acquisition, Viv Labs, being based on S Voice shouldn’t seem too surprising as this has been the digital assistant software that Samsung has been working with in their devices, even if it hasn’t been as robust as competing offerings. That being said, Bixby is already rumored to have the capability of handling much more than S Voice ever could, and so if it’s based on S-Voice Samsung is likely to overhaul it quite a bit with new technology to make it measure up to Google Assistant and other services like Alexa or Siri.
The initial report from earlier this afternoon cites that a “person familiar with the matter” states that an upgraded S Voice will essentially be the heart of Samsung’s Bixby efforts. That being said, this is still a rumor and should be treated as such, but it does make sense as S Voice is something that Samsung has already had plenty of time to work with.
This doesn’t mean that Samsung won’t take some of the technology and expertise they acquired in the Viv Labs deal and use it to integrate it into Bixby alongside S Voice, though there is no way of knowing what all will be powering Bixby until Samsung officially announces the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus later this year, which are to be the first two phones that will have the digital assistant inside. Samsung has already trademarked the Bixby logo which surfaced just earlier this morning and a recent rumor suggests that Bixby will support up to eight different languages at launch, and if true then it would seem that Samsung is gearing up to make it as full-featured and compatible as possible. While eight doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s already more than the number of languages supported by Google Assistant, which has been out since last Fall. This could give Bixby an upper hand on Google Assistant even if it won’t be able to do as much functionality wise.