Samsung's Bixby Just Got Some New AI Tricks to Help It Understand You Better

Samsung has just released a significant update of its digital assistant platform Bixby to help it compete with the Alexas and Siris of the world. 

The Bixby experience has been completely overhauled, thanks to improved AI (artificial intelligence) and a new language recognition engine that impacts nearly every aspect of use. In simpler terms, the assistant now understands you better and can react accordingly.

What does this mean exactly? Samsung says the new language recognition engine allows Bixby to help go through text messages, access health metrics, peruse the calendar, listen to music, and more. This is all fairly basic stuff, but now Bixby is smart enough to remember previous tasks and string tasks together. 

To that end, Samsung gives the example of asking Bixby to launch a workout on Samsung Health and then asking the assistant to play music for the workout. As usual, Bixby is also great for setting timers, taking screenshots, and turning on the flashlight, among other tasks.

Bixby now even allows English-speaking users to answer an incoming call with a text, which Bixby translates to speech and communicates on your behalf. The tyranny of having to say, "I’m busy, but I’ll call you back,” is nearly at an end. Now you can just type it. Samsung is even testing a feature that lets Bixby emulate your voice when translating these text messages. 

The update is rolling out now to Galaxy users, but this is a tiered release, and it may take until the end of the month for the update to make its way to everyone.