Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant has finally broken cover with a brief video showing it being used on a Galaxy S8 unit, the first such video that seems to have surfaced so far. The video is incredibly blurry and does not seem to show any commands being issued to Bixby, but does show what looks like a menu or popup for Bixby, similar to what Google Assistant users get when they hold down the home button on their device and don’t issue any commands. The large orange area of the Bixby main app screen seems to be full of different actions it could perform for a user, but it’s hard to tell with how incredibly blurry this video is. Bixby’s logo is intact, and seems to match previous leaks, but the exact details are yet another victim of the low quality of the video.
Though the video is low in quality and a lot of details can’t be made out, we can figure out a few key details about Bixby. For starters, it won’t strictly be a voice assistant; unlike Google Assistant, the main page of Bixby, if that is indeed what we’re looking at here, responds to touches in the video, and seems to be rife with options and information, looking almost akin to the Google Feed screen. Piggybacking off of that detail, it could be said that Bixby will mix information and actions in one place, taking advantage of the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus’ screen stature and oddball resolution to deliver a full experience on a single screen with little compromise in the name of efficiency or aesthetics.
What this video decidedly lacks, however, is a showing of Bixby’s features. Samsung’s recent announcement paints Bixby as a more intelligent, differently-learning solution in comparison to AI assistants on the market today, but the capabilities seem to lean heavily on third-party apps and services integrating with Bixby via an SDK that Samsung will eventually release. While Samsung is popular enough to warrant a decent amount of support for their ecosystem, in the end, we could potentially be looking at a small fish in a crowded pond, or we could be seeing the birth of a complex and nuanced AI that could out-human and outperform what’s currently available. A clearer idea will be offered next week when Samsung officially unveils the two new flagship phones.