Samsung heavily promoted its new Bixby AI assistant at the Galaxy S8 unveiling. The company is pretty serious about Bixby which is evident from the fact that the Galaxy S8 comes with a dedicated hardware button to launch the assistant.

The features that Samsung showed off while unveiling Bixby today were impressive, but nothing particularly pathbreaking. For instance, you can use Bixby in Samsung apps to do almost anything by using just your voice. This includes rotating photos, send emails, set reminders, and more.

That’s not all: there’s also Bixby Vision. While not really unique, Bixby Vision essentially acts like Google Goggles or Amazon Firefly, though Samsung’s implementation seems more polished. Basically, Bixby is able to recognise objects, QR codes, and identify items right from the camera app of the Galaxy S8. For the recognised items, Bixby can automatically pull in their reviews and other information from Samsung’s partners like Amazon, Pinterest, and others.

While there’s more to Bixby and its bound to improve over time, Bixby is going to be severely limited at launch as it will only support US English and Korean languages. Samsung will add support for US Spanish and Chinese languages soon after the Galaxy S8 launches, but there is no word from the company on when support for other languages will be added to its AI-powered assistant.

Considering this is Samsung’s first try at an AI-powered assistant, I guess we should cut the company some slack and see how it works on improving Bixby over time.

What do you think about Bixby? Impressed? Or are you going to stick with Google Assistant?