We all know Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, but we know less about Bixby, which is one of the voice assistants found on many smartphones. Indeed, it is the Samsung module, which should allow you to manage many features on your Korean brand mobile by voice.
It's not widely used, even by big fans of Samsung, but Bixby is still preinstalled on a large number of devices from the Korean giant. How does it work ? What is he capable of? I tell you everything you need to know about Bixby!
Bixby, what is it?
It is therefore a Samsung voice assistant, which arrived for the first time on the Galaxy S8, in 2017. It is designed to work on many devices of the brand, and not only smartphones, since it is also found on refrigerators or Smart TV Family Hub.
According to Samsung, Bixby is able to evolve. He learns to know his user in order to provide increasingly personalized answers. Initially, it had its own button on mobiles, but users didn't catch on, so the option was removed.
Basically, you will be able to use it to ask him to call a contact, to send an SMS, to set the alarm, to have the weather forecast for the day or the next day, to lower or raise the sound of the smartphone , increase text size, open app, clean phone, etc. Basically, you can do almost everything just by voice, which is obviously very useful when you're in the car, but also when you have a disability.
Bixby Vision, other visual features
Added about a year and a half ago, Bixby Vision looks a bit like Google Lens. We will be able to translate text directly from the camera, scan a QR Code or even discover a product that we have in front of us. For example, if you put the camera sensor on a watch or on a bottle of wine, Bixby will search for the name of the object and sometimes even give you the price.
There is also a “scene description”. We take a photo and Bixby will tell you what the smartphone sees in front of it. He knows how to recognize a car, a bedroom, an office, a garden etc. There is also a color sensor, which can be useful for people with sight problems.
The accuracy isn't always amazing, but it's quite effective for scenes that are well readable, without too many objects in front of the camera.
Is Bixby effective?
If the first versions were rather mediocre, with in particular great difficulties for the assistant to understand French, it is much better today. You can talk normally, and Bixby effectively notices and understands everything you say.
For a long time, there were few developments and we even thought that Samsung was going to abandon its voice assistant project. For many users, Bixby was useless and very frustrating to use. As a result, many simply blocked it.
Things are much better now, even if Google Assistant remains more efficient and therefore remains the preferred voice assistant for Android smartphone users.