After months of rumors and speculation, Samsung officially revealed its latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, at a press event in New York Wednesday. But along with the usual updates and specifications, the new smartphone will heavily feature Samsung's new Bixby virtual assistant. Here's what we know about the new Samsung AI assistant.

Read: Samsung Galaxy S8 Release Date Confirmed, Introduces Infinity Display And Facial Recognition

Samsung Galaxy S8 Bixby Button Features

Bixby Button: On the left side of the phone, you'll see a dedicated Bixby button. As Android Central notes, the phone will still be able to turn on Bixby if you say certain words, but it's a secondary way to turn on and start using Bixby.

Augmented Reality: One of Samsung's bolder gambits with Bixby is its scope. While it's still very much in the mold of traditional smartphone assistants and can answer questions, Samsung plans to integrate it on a deeper level into the smartphone.

One of the ways Samsung's doing so is through Bixby Vision. In this mode, the virtual assistant uses your camera to overlay and pull data on what it sees for you. As The Verge found, the app could smoothly pull information from sources like QR codes and — similarly to services like Amazon Firefly — cleanly identified products.

Bixby's Voice: Virtual assistants like Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa have one thing in common: they've defaulted to female voices and traditionally female names. Bixby defaults to a female-sounding voice out of the box, but as the Wall Street Journal points out, you can also change the AI to have a male voice.

Smarter Assistance: Virtual assistants have been powered by your voice, but developers have often had to paper over limitations with the technology in obvious ways, as when Siri just pulls up Bing results when you ask her a difficult question.

With Bixby, Samsung wants to make voice be just as easy of a way to control your phone as using the touchscreen. Via Engadget, Samsung did an extended demo where they asked Bixby to "capture this and send it to Cindy" and Bixby could fully understand the context of the request. At the moment, Samsung's goals for Bixby's voice integration are still relatively early off, as it's only fully integrated into Samsung's apps, but Samsung said it'll work with other third-party apps and Google services.