The development of Samsung’s AI assistant Bixby has been a bit turbulent but the South Korean manufacturing giant has made some strides with this assistant. Bixby was to be launched alongside Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ but that couldn’t happen because it wasn’t ready as at the time (April 2017) that these smartphones touched down. Almost three months down the line, Samsung was able to roll out the English speaking version of Bixby and some days ago, it unveiled the Chinese speaking version which now brings Bixby’s language support to three including its native South Korean language. Now, Samsung just bought over a South Korean startup “Fluently” with the aim to strengthen Bixby’s voice capabilities. Fluently specializes in text-based conversational artificial intelligence.
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As of now, Samsung’s plan for Fluently is unknown. It could expunge Fluently app from Play Store and use the technology exclusively for Bixby. This acquisition was spearheaded by Samsung Research, the firm’s new dedicated AI center. We will have to keep our fingers crossed to see what happens to this startup.
Lee Byung-Tae, a Professor at KAIST College of Business in Seoul
“Samsung is now aggressively expanding its AI capabilities by taking over related manpower and organizations, as it views that the technology will be applied to all areas in the future,”
Although the Korean tech giant has struggled with Bixby’s development, the company has responded very well by bringing Bixby functionality to over 200 countries in the last few months.