Samsung Galaxy S8’s voice assistant ‘Bixby’ will do visual searches, text recognition: Report

The standard camera app on the S8 will be featuring its own button for Bixby, which will give access to a search tool that will then process whatever object the camera is pointed at; the assistant will then analyse the image and be able to identify the objects. Optical Character Recognition will help process any text that is seen by the camera.

It is no secret that Samsung has a lot riding on the upcoming Galaxy S8, the first flagship to be launched by the company since the Galaxy Note 7 incident. To make sure that its new smartphone will be a runaway success, Samsung is pulling out all the stops that includes the addition of its own digital assistant.

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Samsung acquired Viv Labs, a developer for AI and assistant systems that was co-founded by Chris Brigham, Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus – the creators of Apple’s Siri back in October 2016. Bixby is powered by Viv’s intelligence, and is speculated to be much more advanced as compared to Samsung’s S Voice – bringing system wide integration.

Samsung Galaxy S8 is expected to launch on March 29, with shipments starting sometime in late April. The phone is rumoured to be priced at $849 (approx Rs 58,000).