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Bixby on all Samsung devices by 2020

The_Chief

The_Chief

Accept no imitations!
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Yes, Bixby is widely panned in the tech blog world. I suspect it's because they're jealous: it can run rings around Siri and Google Assistant, especially with complex commands. Tell Google to open your camera, take a selfie and post it to Facebook. Bixby will do that. Bam, bam, bam.

Samsung has announced that by 2020 Bixby will be embedded in all their products. In addition to massive improvements, Bixby 2.0 will also be open-source so other companies can use it as well. I asked Samsung how far back they were going to retroactively install Bixby on their TVs, and was told 2017 and later. Of COURSE we have a 2016 model!

Since the Darling Bride is so technologically declined, I'm always looking for ways to simplify her life. We've had the same entertainment system for two years and I'm still having to teach her the same, basic stuff over and over again. Bless her heart. So Bixby would be a real help for her.

I went to Best Buy, just to compare the picture of the 2018 Q9F with our curved-screen KS9500. OMG. We have a 4K TV, but I wasn't prepared for that. The picture is stunning. My jaw literally dropped. It has 100% color brightness across the entire color spectrum. And Samsung will finance the TV at 0% with an upgrade to a new one every two years. And you get to sell the previous one, making it almost a wash!

I'll never buy anything from Best Buy, but you need to just go look at it. You'll be mesmerized. But we've decided to wait and see what the 2019 model offers.
 
Personally, I think bixby is just plain awful. I literally hate it. I have it completely disabled. I had the S8, now I have the S9+, most likely will get the next Samsung in line, but I still will have no use for bixby. I find it utterly useless. The "complex" commands it runs, are not terribly complex.
 
The thing with Bixby is when you get it to integrate your entire household if you build all Samsung. In the US this may not be that big a deal since there are a lot of companies that sell products compatible to Google Home or Alexa, but step into Asia and those things are rare. If all Samsung devices come out with this, then your entire home can work seamlessly together.
 
As I understand at the moment Bixby still only supports English(United States), Mandarin(China) and Korean...that's something that definitely needs to improve so it's usable by much of the world's population(including me seen as I'm not an American).

Compare to Apple Siri..
languages.jpg


And Microsoft Cortana has quite comprehensive language support as well.
 
Bixby 2.0 will be open-source, so other companies can integrate it into their products as well. That said, they will only put forth the effort and expense IF Bixby looks like it will succeed as a cross-platform AI assistant and provide good ROI. Samsung has a lot riding on this, so it should be interesting to see how it improves.
 
Hmm, I was reading this morning how a consumer group in the UK did a privacy test of "smart home" gadgets, and found that a new Samsung TV connected to 700 distinct internet addresses within 15 minutes of being turned on (and has a privacy policy that allows them to monitor your viewing and share that information with advertisers). I don't know whether they are worse than others or not, but your average consumer will have no control over stuff like this. It's the sort of thing that makes me wary.

It was the thought of Bixby being "open source" that made me think of this: what data will it share with Samsung, and what bits of Bixby will be open source? Presumably just some on-device element, and I can't imagine they'll allow you to use the source but cut them out of the deal (e.g. route data elsewhere rather than using Samsung's backend), because there's nothing in that for Samsung. I should add that I'm an equal opportunity sceptic here: I have Google Assistant completely turned off.

Mind you, a significant part of why I have Assistant (and most of the access it would require to operate) disabled is that I turned it on for a few weeks and found that I didn't use it, and didn't find it terribly useful when I did. The irony is that doing this prompted me to go through my Google account settings, with the result that Google have less access to my data now than they had before I had Assistant.
 
Hadron said:
Hmm, I was reading this morning how a consumer group in the UK did a privacy test of "smart home" gadgets, and found that a new Samsung TV connected to 700 distinct internet addresses within 15 minutes of being turned on (and has a privacy policy that allows them to monitor your viewing and share that information with advertisers). I don't know whether they are worse than others or not, but your average consumer will have no control over stuff like this. It's the sort of thing that makes me wary.
Click to expand...

If that's the case, I wonder what impact GPDR will have on their plans?

I used Bixby once or twice, found it terrible and it's been disabled ever since. If this is being integrated into their TV's and other electrical products, I'll likely never buy a Samsung product again. To be fair though, that extends to any assistant baked in to anything it shouldn't be. I don't want a toaster/kettle/fridge etc connected to the internet, listening to my conversations.
 
The Which report did mention a "connected toothbrush", which connects to a phone to allow you to monitor your brushing habits(*), which had permission to access your phone's microphone - though that did sound more like sloppy coding, since it never seemed to be used.

(*) And so the world ends, not with a bang but with a self-absorbed obsession with quantifying your life rather than actually living...
 
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