Google, Amazon, and Samsung are competing to create the best mobile personal assistant available. Google Assistant has a head start and is slowly branching out to more home and personal devices with time. Then we have Amazon, which is very clearly invested in the smart home game with their Amazon Alexa personal assistant (which has also made its way some phones like the HTC U11, Huawei Mate 9, the Moto X4, and the Moto Z line). Now, less than 6 months after launching Bixby on the Galaxy S8, Samsung is announcing version 2.0 of its personal assistant.

At the Samsung Developer Conference 2017 in San Francisco, Samsung announced revision 2.0 of their assistant which is present in select Samsung devices like the Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+ and Galaxy Note 8. Bixby 2.0 improves on three major aspects of the current version of Bixby: functionality, availability, and openness. 2.0 includes improved language capabilities for better, more natural commands and more complex processing of data. Just like Google Assistant, the revised Bixby will get to know you (and your close relatives) better to allow you to customize your experience to your own life and workflow.

Furthermore, Bixby will be available on a wider array of devices, which now doesn’t just include mobile phones. Indeed, it will now be available on Samsung’s huge fleet of smart home devices which includes TVs, refrigerators, home speakers, and a lot more. While Bixby on phones focuses on controlling different aspects of the UI with your voice, Bixby on these devices would have somewhat different use cases due to the lack of a UI to control. It’s not clear yet whether existing devices will be updated to support Bixby or if instead only newer devices will ship with it out of the box, but it’s a pretty exciting development nonetheless.

Finally, Samsung is, at long last, opening up the platform to developers. A private beta of the Bixby SDK, which will allow developers to build services around this voice assistant, will become available soon for select developers. With the number of participants growing over time, the SDK is eventually going to be made available for all developers in the future. If you would like to learn more about what version 2.0 will bring, we recommend reading the full press release linked below.

from xda-developers By Arol Wright

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