Samsung Galaxy S8's Bixby AI Assistant Will Run On Most Of Its Native Apps

Earlier this year, Samsung acquired Viv, an artificial intelligence assistant from the creators of Siri. Now it’s been discovered that Samsung’s Bixby will be powered by Viv’s tech and will be supported in almost all of the Galaxy S8’s native apps.

Bixby is said to work system wide on the Galaxy S8. This means that most of the apps that are already preinstalled on Samsung’s smartphone will support the AI assistant, according to SamMobile. For example, a user will be able to ask Bixby to show photos taken at a particular date in the Gallery app.

Since Bixby will be running system wide on the Galaxy S8, Samsung will also be changing all the user interface of all its first party apps. All the preinstalled apps will carry a consistent look to give the Galaxy S8’s software a more unified look. Another change coming to Samsung’s software is that the status bar will always be visible, so that users won’t have to swipe twice to see notifications and quick settings.

Samsung’s Bixby will be replacing the South Korean company’s S Voice software on the Galaxy S8. Bixby will also be able to function much like Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri by being able to answer a user’s queries and perform tasks based on context.

With the Galaxy S8 running the Android operating system, it remains to be seen how Google will react to Bixby. Samsung will be directly competing with Google Assistant, a core feature on the Android operating system, as pointed out by BGR.

On the hardware side, the highly anticipated smartphone is rumored to come with 5-inch and 6-inch models with a 2K Super AMOLED dual-curved display. The handset is believed to have a screen-to-body ratio of around 90 percent, according to Phone Arena. Units in the United States might possibly be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chipset and might be accompanied by 8GB of RAM.

The Samsung Galaxy S8 is expected to be announced in April 2017, two months later than Samsung’s usual release cycle.