14 DAY TRIAL // During the Samsung Developer Conference (SDC) 2017 event that took place in San Francisco, US, Samsung today unveiled its plans for the next major release of the Bixby personal intelligent assistant.
Samsung introduced its Bixby voice-powered digital assistant earlier this year as part of the Galaxy S8 and S8+ launch. Designed as a reboot to company's now deprecated S Voice voice assistant app that Samsung used since 2012 starting with the Galaxy S III, Bixby aims to play a more important role in our digital lives, and the next major release, Bixby 2.0, promises to take over the IoT world.
With Bixby 2.0, Samsung promises to let its digital assistant do more than set alarms, add a new entry in your calendar, play music, set reminders, or answer elementary questions. According to Samsung's EVP Eui-Suk Chung, Bixby 2.0 will get involved more in our lives thanks to the improvements brought to its natural language capabilities, allowing it to better understand the world around.
"Now, we are ready to take Bixby to the next level. Bixby 2.0 is a bold reinvention of the platform. A reinvention aimed at transforming basic digital assistants from a novelty to an intelligence tool that is a key part of everyone’s daily life," said Eui-Suk Chung, EVP, Head of Service Intelligence of Mobile Communications Business. "Bixby 2.0 will be ubiquitous, available on any and all devices."
Bixby 2.0 will be open
Best of all, starting with Bixby 2.0, Samsung opens the doors for any developer to contribute new features to the intelligent personal assistant, and it launched today the first beta program for Bixby SDK (Software Development Kit). At the moment, the beta program is limited to some developers that Samsung will select, but will soon be extended to more developers.
In time, the beta program will open its doors to all developers worldwide as Bixby 2.0 wants to be the ultimate marketplace for intelligence. Samsung says that Bixby 2.0 will also open the door for new business opportunities through a wide range of revenue models, and new ways for application developers to reach users. The aims it for Bixby 2.0 to run on more smart devices than just your phone, coming in 2018.