Remember Bixby? Samsung’s AI assistant to take on the ubiquitous Google Assistant? Unless you work for the company, there’s probably no need to keep that name in your memory banks. But the South Korean tech giant may give us a reason to in the future, when it gets beefed up with generative AI tech.
Speaking to CNBC, Samsung’s head of mobile TM Roh said the company will unveil an upgraded version of Bixby equipped with its own LLM this year. Not too surprising, as there have been rumours of the company developing its own floating around since last year. The report also quotes Roh as saying, at least via a translator, “we’re going to advance Bixby with application of Gen AI technology”, though this sounds like the integration of Galaxy AI into it.
That being the case though, it’s unclear if Samsung will still be keeping it as a virtual assistant, or turning it into a generative AI chatbot. For context, Google Gemini when running on an Android phone doesn’t do the things that Assistant does, and you can’t have both enabled and activated at the same time. So it’s unclear which direction Bixby will go down.
Of course, if Samsung could do what Google didn’t and combine the two into one, it would be a convincing reason to be using the former’s singular virtual assistant and chatbot over the latter’s two separate entities. That would perhaps be overly optimistic, but whatever form it takes, we can only wait before we find out.
(Source: CNBC)
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