Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant for the Galaxy S8 and S8+ is now available in Australia and a total of over 200 countries and territories worldwide.
After initially only being available in Korean at launch, Bixby launched in the United States last month with US English. These languages will now be expanded to Australia as well as countries like the UK, Canada and South Africa.
“Bixby is an intelligent way of interacting with your Samsung smartphone,” said Garry McGregor, Director, IT and Mobile, Samsung Electronics Australia.
“With the introduction of Bixby voice, our Australian customers with a compatible smartphone will be able activate the power and functionality of the Bixby experience simply by speaking with their device,” McGregor said.
Among the capabilities of Bixby is Quick Commands, which can be used to create custom voice commands for a series of actions, like “good night” for turning on Do Not Disturb mode, setting an alarm and turning on the blue light filter.
Samsung also highlighted Bixby’s design to understand typical speech and cross-application commands, and its nature as an “intelligent interface”, rather than a standalone app, that enables it to control almost all the usual functions of apps that are Bixby-enabled.
The company notes that “not all accents, dialects and expressions” may be recognised by Bixby.
“Natural language understanding allows Bixby to continuously improve its ability to interpret regional dialects. But, since Bixby learns more frequently used command terms more quickly, it will take more time for Bixby to fully understand regional dialects that are used less frequently,” Samsung said.
Samsung plans to roll out Bixby to “additional countries, languages, devices, features and third-party applications” in the future.
