Comment on Samsung tapped the creators of Siri to build Bixby 2.0 — and it's putting it on everything

Samsung has launched the next version of its voice assistant Bixby, with technology from the creators of Siri baked into the product. Viv was an intelligent voice assistant software company established by the developers of Siri, after they sold that business to Apple. Apple now uses Siri widely on iPhones and Apple TV. Viv was then acquired by Samsung last year, but the Korean company’s newest smartphones Galaxy S8, S8+ and Galaxy Note8 have used its own voice assistant named Bixby, rather than Viv. That all changed at the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, as the company announced a new version of Bixby while revealing that Viv technology has been integrated into it. Samsung chief technology officer Injong Rhee told the audience that the smartphone industry had a problem with ever-expanding functionality but limited screen space to access those features. This is where voice assistants come in, to enable verbal commands as a shortcut to perform actions that would require complex interactions on a touchscreen. Rhee demonstrated this “flattening” of the user interface on stage to program a one-word command to pick out a picture of his daughter from his phone and post to Twitter. This is the tweet that went out live on stage: Tweet Embed:https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/920705552774176768?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwMy daughter -- proud dad pic.twitter.com/PpozhDdr7d Rhee said voice commands are even more important for connected devices that lack a screen altogether, and introduced Project Ambience – a dongle, currently under development, that plugs into dumb devices to enable it to be controlled by Bixby. “If it doesn’t have a screen, voice commands seem to be the most natural way of interacting with a device.” From 2018, Bixby will also be included in Samsung televisions, as well as Family Hub smart refrigerator. “You’ll be able to go channel up or channel down, but also search for content… Find a cooking show, show me some action films featuring Tom Cruise,” Samsung chief product officer Giles BianRosa said.