Samsung’s Bixby is out to compete with other AI assistants in the market. Its cred? Rapping.
In Korean, at least. A video posted online showed the Galaxy S8‘s much-hyped AI assistant with a female voice rapping. The three-minute clip of Bixby rap was also discovered to contain a shoutout to Apple Siri.
Bixby was baked into the Galaxy S8 when it was launched on March 29, with the voice command feature released in South Korea on May 1. The U.S. version is set for a spring release.
Bixby Bustin’ Some Bars
In a video posted on YouTube, a Galaxy S8 owner showed Bixby’s voice skills, including rapping when asked “please rap.” The three-minute video featured a female voice dropping some rhymes to some hip-hop beats. A user in an online forum discovered that there is more to Bixby’s fancy lines.
When one of the Korean verses was arranged in a stanza, and by looking at the first letters of each starting words, the verse spells out a hidden message to its archrival, Apple’s very own Siri. When translated to English, the lines ( 시리보다 내가 낫다 ) read:
“I am better than Siri.”
Now those are some fighting words! However, Bixby can’t speak English yet; the U.S. release has been scheduled “later this spring.” In addition, Siri can support multiple languages, including the default English, Spanish, French, and Bixby’s native Korean. No one knows if Bixby will also rap in English, so the edge still goes to Siri.
If this shoutout comes out as challenge to Siri, who knows if Apple will respond accordingly. If Siri begins to rap, then a rap battle between AI assistants will likely invade the tech airwaves.
Here is an English translation of the rap:
Something that doesn’t change with time
Bixby on the rhythm
Seeing is not everything / You’ll know when I speak
Please tell me one more time Bixby
I’ll rap so sing me a song
Take it deep into your heart Bixby
Doesn’t matter if you can’t spell
Please tell me one more time Bixby
Who Is Bixby, Anyway?
Bixby is Samsung’s very own digital assistant, an answer to the growing trend in the tech market, such as Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa/Echo.
According to Samsung, Bixby is more of a phone assistant to help navigate the complex features of today’s mobile devices, such as the Galaxy S8. Samsung’s philosophy toward Bixby’s design and development is this:
“Instead of humans learning how the machine interacts with the world … it is the machine that needs to learn and adapt to us,” wrote Samsung. Bixby is driven by three pillars: completeness, context awareness, and cognitive tolerance.
Unlike most assistants, Bixby isn’t fully voice-activated; the Galaxy S8 features a dedicated Bixby button on the right side below the volume control.
Bixby isn’t a search engine. As mentioned, it is a phone assistant to help with the phone’s features. Thus, it will support everything your phone does, including photo editing, media sharing, or even giving you a live feed (like Google Now).
Bixby supports Vision (machine learning via the camera) to recognize objects, Reminders (for tasks), and Voice (for asking questions about the weather, news, etc). More features (first- and third-party enabled) are expected to roll out in the future.
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