Samsung's Bixby, its Siri rival, stammers at the start
NEW YORK—Things are starting out miserably for Bixby.
Samsung’s upstart artificial intelligence digital assistant got an “incomplete” grade when it first turned up on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones that launched in March. The reason is that the voice-based commands that promise to make Bixby behave more like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Assistant were delayed, at least in the U.S. (Bixby Voice is fully operational in South Korea, where Samsung is based.)
Now the Korea Herald is reporting further delays to the English-speaking version of Bixby, apparently because Samsung can’t amass the “big data” required for a good enough deep learning-based experience.
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I believe it. While Samsung recently granted early access to select S8 and S8+ users who expressed interest in trying out Bixby Voice, me among them, I’m being kind to suggest that Bixby has a lot of catching up to do compared to its rivals.
I’d have expected Bixby to be somewhat further along if only because Samsung bought Viv Labs last fall, an AI-startup which had been co-founded by the human brains behind Siri. But Viv doesn’t seem to have lent much of a helpful voice to Bixby.
Or as Edison Investment Research analyst Richard Windsor notes: “Viv seems to be inexplicably gathering dust on a shelf until Bixby is ready for the two to be put together. This increases my suspicion that Viv Labs was in fact the last turkey in the shop and that in reality its system does not work nearly as well as had been promised when it was demonstrated.”
Bixby’s stammering start is the latest setback for a company whose reputation took a hit last year when its Note 7 smartphones had to be recalled multiple times, after some of the devices caught fire.
Samsung has major ambitions for Bixby, not just in its smartphones but eventually in appliances and other devices. Even with the latest apparent delay, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Samsung is developing a voice-activated Bixby speaker that will eventually pit it against the likes of Amazon’s Echo speakers, Google’s Home, as well as upcoming speakers from Microsoft and Apple. Samsung declined to comment on the report.
What Bixby is good at
In its current incarnation, Bixby Voice is mostly about delivering on vocal shortcuts to tasks and functions on the Galaxy phones itself, rather than being any good at answering basic questions or tapping into the vast reservoir of knowledge where, say, the Google Assistant excels.
On the S8+ Bixby did ok responding to some of my commands, at least when I was heard properly. When I asked Bixby to “Call Eli on the speakerphone,” the assistant automatically found the correct contact, turned on the speakerphone and dialed his number. I didn’t have to go through multiple manual steps to get there. (Siri can pull off the same trick.)
“Show me my weekly schedule,” successfully summoned my calendar.
When I asked Bixby to “take a selfie,” it fired up the camera, automatically switched from the rear camera view to the front camera, and snapped my image after a 3-2-1 countdown. And when I asked the assistant to “show me the last picture that I took” and later to “edit this picture by drawing on it,” Bixby properly delivered on those requests as well.
Where Bixby stumbles
Where Bixby came up way short was in tackling questions that are routine for other assistants: When I asked, “how tall is the Eiffel Tower?” Bixby served up a screen giving me three weird choices to tap on, “change to Korean,” “Bixbyphone_103.BixbyVoice_1510,” or “Write it down.” Eventually, on another try, Bixby at least pointed me to proper web results for the Eiffel Tower.
Bixby was similarly baffled when I asked, “who is Clayton Kershaw?” Bixby mistakenly thought I was looking for a contact and said it couldn’t find one, rather than showing me information about the ace Los Angeles Dodger pitcher.
The response I got to my query on “any good sushi restaurants near here?” was an answer I received all-too-frequently: “I didn’t catch that.”
Similarly, my request to “convert 100 Canadian dollars to U.S. dollars,” led to “Please wait a moment and try again.” When I did try again, Bixby asked me to tap on the unit converter I wanted to use—options that included “area,” “length” and “temperature” converters-- rather than supply an answer like Siri and Google did.
Samsung's assistant isn't just about voice. One feature called Bixby Vision, for example, leverages the phone's camera to handle a range of tasks, from translating text to identifying bottles of wine. Another called Bixby Home is similar to customizable Google Now cards for weather, fitness activity and more.
But Samsung concedes that Bixby Voice is still a work in progress, and in fact, within the settings on your phone, you can flip a Bixby Labs switch where Bixby “experiments” with various other apps, some from Samsung itself as well as some notable third party apps, including Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Instagram, Uber and Twitter. As with other Bixby Voice experiences the assistant struggled here, too.
Samsung also lets you tap buttons when you get certain responses to let the company know how Bixby Voice is doing: A “Well done” button if Bixby got something right, and a “Let’s improve” button when it comes up short.
Suffice it to say, I tapped “Let’s improve” a lot.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter