Samsung opens its AI based Bixby voice assistant to third-party developers

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“Our goal is to offer developers a robust, scalable and open AI platform that makes it easy for them to launch and evolve the amazing experiences they create for our users,”
-Kyunghak Hyun, Product Manager of the AI Product Management Group at Samsung.

At Samsung Developer Conference 2018, the company announced the opening of Bixby Developer Studio, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), to developers. This will allow third party developers to build functionalities for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant. Viv Labs CEO/ Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus told the crowd that their dev tools are “way ahead of the other guys”. The company will also be introducing Bixby Marketplace, for users to understand the new functionality of their voice assistant. This will even help developers make money using the functionalities of this intelligent companion.

Bixby, that started as a practical way to use voice to interact with the phone, will now evolve into a scalable, open AI platform to support watches, refrigerators, tablets, washing machine, and many more devices.

Developers will gain access to the same development tools that Samsung’s internal developers use to create Bixby Capsules, which will be used by them to build to add features to Bixby. Just like Skills on Google Alexa, developers can create custom Bixby interactions that can be added to various devices in the future.

Samsung said the move was in line to support the company’s goal of building a scalable, open Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform where developers and service providers can access tools to bring Bixby to more people and devices around the world.

As another initiative to scale Bixby services, Samsung is planning to expand support to five new languages- including British English, French, German, Italian and Spanish – in the coming months. This will especially be crucial to source Bixby-enabled devices like the Galaxy Home and smart fridges all around the globe.

Samsung also demonstrated the capabilities of Bixby at the conference. The demo included Bixby helping a user in booking a hotel by opening various portals used in the process.

This move – along with expanding Bixby to more devices and expanding support for more languages – is seen as Samsungs effort to increase Bixby’s recognition around the globe.
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