There’s a new virtual assistant on the block. Ahead of next week’s announcement of the Galaxy S8, Samsung has introduced the world to Bixby, its own entry into the increasingly crowded AI lscape.

Samsung is a bit late to the AI race led by exa, Siri, Assistant, but it has a bit of a different strategy. Instead of wowing us with encyclopedic knowledge, Samsung is putting Bixby at the center of the Galaxy experience. (https://lsu79.org/) It’s calling it an intelligent interface, rather than an assistant, it will work across the phone any “Bixby-enabled” apps to reduce the number of taps we need to make.

Rather than adding summoning functionality into the home button, Samsung has built a dedicated button on the side of the S8 (seen in the picture above) to “make it feel easier more comfortable to give comms.” As Samsung explains, “Bixby will be smart enough to underst comms with incomplete information execute the commed task to the best of its knowledge, then will prompt users to provide more information take the execution of the task in piecemeal.”

Bixby will also be aware of which application you are using to provide specific assistance, it will respond to both voice text input, “will be able to support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface.”

How all of this will play out inside the phone will require some serious hs-on, but the example Samsung cites is fairly pedestrian: Instead of taking multiple steps to make a call – turning on unlocking the phone, looking for the phone application, clicking on the contact bar to search for the person that you’re trying to call pressing the phone icon to start dialing – you will be able to do all these steps with one push of the Bixby button a simple comm.”

ile Bixby will launch on the Galaxy S8, Samsung has plans to bring it to all its appliances to create an ecosystem of smart devices that can be controlled through the AI interface. On the S8, Samsung says “a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled” at launch with more to follow an SDK “eventually” offered to developers.

Samsung doesn’t say whether you’ll be able to summon Bixby with a voice comm, nor does it say whether it will be also able to respond to traditional knowledge-based queries, or deliver weather forecasts or sports scores. It’s possible that Samsung will be leaving those uses to Assistant task Bixby strictly with phone functions.

The Bixby buzz: ’ve been hearing for a while now that Bixby would be the name of Samsung’s digital assistant, so there’s no surprise there. at is interesting, however, is the way Samsung appears to be deploying Bixby on the Galaxy S8. By focusing on phone functions, Bixby could actually end up being more useful than Siri or Assistant, especially if it bakes that functionality deep into the interface exps it to its line of Gear watches. ile we’ll get a better picture of Bixby at next week’s S8 launch in New York City, for now, we’ll have to take Samsung on its word when it says that “Bixby is at the heart of our software services evolution as a company.”