Samsung Says Bixby Voice Assistant Is Delayed ⇥ axios.com

Ina Fried, Axios:

One of the key signature features of Samsung’s Galaxy S8, its Bixby voice assistant, won’t work out of the box, when the device goes on sale later this month. Other parts of Bixby, including its visual search and reminder abilities, will ship at launch, a Samsung representative told Axios in a statement.

On Twitter, Fried said that Bixby crashed in her demo; Business Insider’s Steve Kovach said much the same.

Bixby is derived from Viv, which premiered at Disrupt NY in May of last year, running fairly smoothly on an iPhone. Samsung acquired the company in October, so they’ve been working to build it into the Galaxy S8 presumably since then. Just goes to show how hard it is to take an existing piece of software, port it to another platform, and make it a core part of the system.

Update: A correction: though some functions of Bixby are enabled by Viv, the core of it is apparently Samsung’s own effort, according to Dan Seifert of the Verge:

Though Bixby is a product of Samsung’s own internal development, the company’s recent acquisition, Viv, will be put to work making Bixby play nice with other third-party services. Viv has a pedigree here: the company was founded by the creators of Apple’s Siri assistant, which had many third-party integrations before it was folded into iOS itself. If there’s a bull case to be made that Bixby will be successful, Viv will be central to it.

Thanks to “sciwizam”.