Back in February, Samsung used its Galaxy S8 and S8+ to introduce Bixby to the world. Bixby has had a rocky life so far, but despite a delayed release in the United States and a lacking feature set from day one, the AI has actually progressed into something that's not complete garbage.
Samsung will be holding a developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 18, and according to a new report from The Korea Herald, this is where the company will be announcing Bixby 2.0. Bixby 2.0 is expected to be an upgraded version of the assistant that we already have, and although not too much is known about the update just yet, there are a couple key features that we can supposedly look forward to.
The first of these is further integration with third-party services. You can already use Bixby Voice to call an Uber, start playing a song on Google Play Music, and plenty more, so we're excited to see what other apps the AI will be expanding to. Along with this, it's also suggested that Bixby 2.0 will have a big focus on its use in devices other than smartphones.
Moving Bixby to smartwatches seems like the most natural next step.
We've already seen Bixby make its way to Samsung's incoming Gear IconX wireless earbuds, but we've yet to see the assistant appear on any of Samsung's smartwatches. Moving Bixby to the likes of the Gear S3 and Gear Sport only makes sense, and along with this, there's also the chance of a Samsung smart speaker that we've been hearing rumors about for months now.
Leading up to Bixby 2.0's announcement, Samsung has also appointed Chung Eui-suk as the head of service intelligence for future development of Bixby. Chung Eui-suk is Vice Chief of Samsung Research America, and the move was made as a result of Bixby's poor market response.
Bixby might not ever become as popular or powerful as Google Assistant or Amazon's Alexa, but with a new exec leading the charge and a big 2.0 release less than a week away, it certainly seems like Samsung is going to try it's best to do so.
