Galaxy S8's Bixby AI Assistant Spotted On Samsung's Italian Website

Samsung is expected to launch its own AI assistant for the Galaxy S8, but its name has always been a subject of debate. Thanks to the Italian Samsung website, it does appear like the company’s assistant will indeed be called Bixby.

Samsung’s AI assistant for the Galaxy S8 has a few names floating around, namely Viv, Bixby and Kestra. On the Italian Samsung website under its updated privacy policy, the site mentions Bixby by name located in the voice services section, according to TechRadar.

The webpage doesn’t give out any specific tasks that Bixby is capable of doing, but it did shed some light on what it can do. Apparently, users will be able to control the “all operations with the touch interface” of the Galaxy S8 just by using the Bixby voice assistant, according to Ubergizmo. There’s also mention of playing songs from a playlist and bringing up internet searches using S voice.

Although that’s all the information available, it does seem like Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant will be very powerful. It really has to if Samsung wants to compete aggressively with Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant.

Based on previous rumors, Samsung’s Bixby assistant will be able to support eight languages at launch and will fully function on all of Samsung’s default apps. Bixby is also said to be able to do contextual search based on images.

An example of this is a user can tell Bixby to open up the camera. It can then scan and recognize a product which a user will be able to purchase through Samsung Pay Mini, according to Android Headlines.

The Bixby voice assistant will also function as the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus’s central selling point. There’s also speculations brewing that Samsung might also be planning on making Bixby available to its other products like computers and tablets.