Korean electronics giant Samsung is getting some new high-tech gizmo this week, but this time its all about brains and smarts. The Korean company has just entered the voice-powered virtual assistant arms race, announcing a new intelligent interface for smartphones and consumer devices. Samsung made the huge announcement this week.

According to The Verge, which got the full details of the Samsung Bixby story, the Seoul-based consumer electronics giant this week announced its own entry into the hotly contested world of AI-powered virtual assistant space. Called Bixby, It's Samsung's new 'intelligent interface' for smartphones and it will make using the smartphones much easier and smarter.

Bixby has been thought to have been the product of Samsung's own internal development, which includes the company's recent acquisition of Viv, a digital assistant developed by the same team that first built the popular Siri.

Bixby, which expected to be announced later this month, will make its first appearance in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8. That phone will have a dedicated button on its left side, just below the volume controls. Pressing that button will activate and launch Bixby, Samsung's new voice assistant. Once activated the voice assistant will help users with his digital life.

Compared with its rivals, the Bixby maybe a little bit late in the voice-powered virtual assistant party, but Samsung claims that it's forthcoming Bixby will be fundamentally different from what's already available in the market. Samsung said that the newly introduced intelligent digital assistant will be deeply integrated within the device's mobile apps and it can perform almost every task the app is capable of performing using the traditional touch screen command. This high-tech virtual assistant is said to have a general knowledge of the users' consumer device and can be readily called to perform some action.

Unlike its competitors Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant, which generally offer only a limited subset of any app's full list of features, Bixby will support virtually all of an app's features and functions. Bixby's competitors were generally built to help users quickly perform common tasks. On the other hand, Samsung's Bixby is about making the smartphone easier to use and getting deep ties into all the mobile apps.

Samsung has designed Bixby with one thing in minds that is to replace text or touch-based input completely, letting everything to be controlled entirely by voice commands. The goal is simple- to let smartphone users switch between touch and voice on the fly, without having to confirm whether a given task or action supports voice commands. Samsung also claimed that Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and even execute the action called to the best of its knowledge. Bixby will prompt users to provide more information about a certain commanded task or action and take the decision and execute a certain task in piecemeal.

Finally, Samsung Bixby will initially be limited to ten preinstalled apps in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8, according to Mashable. The new' virtual assistant has also not yet integrate with Viv, the AI firm Samsung acquired last year, so expect some more works in the days to come.

Fortunately, Samsung has some plenty of good news for millions of Samsung users, Bixby will be expanding to other Samsung-built smartphones and other consumer products like TVs, wearables, and even air conditioners. In addition, Samsung also announced plans to open up Bixby for third-party application developers, thus extending Bixby's reach.

In the company's website, Samsung announced that it would be launching Bixby alongside the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 later this month. It also detailed some of its exciting features along the company's long-term strategy with its entry in the brutal voice-powered virtual assistant battleground.

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Topics Samsung, Bixby, Cortana, Siri, Alexa, Google, Microsoft, AI