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Samsung Announces Bixby, Its New Digital Assistant Launching With the Galaxy S8 (phonedog.com)
Samsung has taken the wraps off its new digital assistant that will be launching with the upcoming Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus smartphones. Called "Bixby," the new assistant will use artificial intelligence to enable users to do everything that is possible to do by touch, but with voice. PhoneDog reports: Samsung is touting three main features of its new assistant. The first is "Completeness," which means that when an app is Bixby-enabled, the assistant will able to perform almost every task that the app normally supports using touch. The second Bixby property is "Context Awareness." This means that when Bixby is activated, it'l be able to understand the current context and the state of the app that you're in without interrupting the work that you're doing. Finally, there's "Cognitive Tolerance." Samsung says that Bixby is smart enough to understand commands with incomplete commands, meaning that you don't have to remember the exact phrase that you have to say to perform a task with an assistant. Bixby will also ask you for more information when performing a task and then execute it. A select number of apps on the Galaxy S8 will be Bixby-enabled at launch, and Samsung plans to add more over time. The company also intends to release an SDK so that third-party app developers can add Bixby support to their apps.
"the new assistant will use artificial intelligence to enable users to do everything that is possible to do by touch"
So, every phone comes with a virtual hooker?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The first is "Completeness," which means that when an app is Bixby-enabled, the assistant will able to perform almost every task that the app normally supports using touch.
If previous history is anything to go by, pretty much no one outside of Samsung is going to use a Samsung-only API.
Indeed, you DON'T wanna make a Samsung Galaxy angry. Like Bill Bixby, they have explosive tempers.
Table-ized A.I.
I cannot speak for the rest of you guys but I frankly will not be trusting corporations with any more information than necessary because there seems to be a total lack of accountability in regards to protecting that information. So yeah, until they start making these assistants actually process the data (instead of sending it to a mystery third party) or they start throwing execs in jail when their half-assed security measures fail, I'm going to stay way from this technologies like this.
There is good progress and there is bad progress. This isn't good progress.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The answer, functionally speaking, is in the "Bixby-enabled programs" phrase. The program has to incorporate specific hooks into Bixby. So it's not very smart at all.
If the thing was actually fully general for this task, it'd approach the programs the same way you do; first understanding your intent, and second, implementing it through the same user interface you do. Clearly, it doesn't do that, because... "Bixby-enabled." That's clearly not a mechanism to protect you from the AI talking to programs you don't want it to; that could be done as a preferences item (and should be, for that matter.)
Nor is anything likely to reach the kind of generality required for something that "operates your phone for you" until software (likely hardware, too) gets a lot smarter. The amount of knowledge a user puts into play when interacting with a program is very wide and deep. A personal assistant isn't going to have that kind of understanding at this point in time.
For my part, I am completely unwilling to call this stuff AI. AI means "Artificial Intelligence." This type of thing is artificial, but it definitely isn't intelligent. IMHO, there is no AI. Yet. I call these things low dimensional neural-like systems. I reserve "AI" for the day when intelligence is present. I'm pretty tired of lame-ass marketers calling everything from the toaster to the thermostat "intelligent." YMMV.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You wouldn't like it when it's angry.
If that the case DONT buy the green one, you won't like it if it gets angry. May not go up in flames, but it will rip your clothes. (for those old enough to remember the tv series of the Hulk with Bill Bixby / Lou Ferrigno)
Its bad enough the Feds are doing it, but at least there is still some semblance of court orders, etc.
I don't want companies listening to me all day long and processing it through their AI computer systems.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'm a big fan of Samsungs phones, and have been using them for the last years, ever since I bought the S3.
But it's always in spite of their software. If I could get a clean Android on my S7 now, I would do that right away (and please don't show your ignorance by mentioning cyanogen now). They are great at building hardware, they suck at building software. I can only imagine how sad this is going to be when they now infect many other apps with their systems.
These "helper" apps have been coming and going ever since Clippy. And they are still close to useless.
There is no command or invocation I do on the phone to get me from the current state to another that takes more than a couple of seconds at least. So what is it they want to optimize? If I have to talk to it, then I annoy everyone around me. If they want to do generic gestures, I can already set up 3rd party apps for that. So please explain why this is anything but a marketing stunt that forces crap software down my throat.
It's so sad that those who do offer an almost generic Android on their phones is either really expensive - even compared with higher end Samsungs - or crap hardware or not available here in Denmark.
You seem to be trying to extinguish your burning phone, can I hel...
Google doesn't 'sell' your personal information, because they consider it an asset. They do, however, sell the right to put adverts in front of people matching certain criteria. This has been shown to allow third parties to infer information that Google has about you. The first attack demonstrating this placed adverts for a pizza place with a free pizza code and asked for it to target people in a specific region who identified as gay. Users then went to the pizza company web site, entered their name, address, and coupon, and suddenly someone else had a database of people that Google knew were in a certain area and gay - a very useful took for hate groups. That was years ago and there are now far more subtle attacks that give better information.
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I thought of Bill Bixby, as in Bruce Banner from the TV The Hulk. You don't want to make your phone mad, you won't like it when it's mad.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
For people who want a digital assistant, somehow I doubt that "bixby" will be in any way more useful or functional than Google's. It's just more crapware that nobody asked for and nobody will use in sufficient quantity to justify its existence. It probably needs people to use all the other crapware and Samsung's cloud storage in order to function at all.