Samsung's Bixby, its Siri rival, stammers at the start

NEW YORK--Things are starting out miserably for Bixby. Samsung's upstart artificial intelligence digital assistant got an "incomplete" grade when it first turned up on the Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones that launched in March. The reason is that the voice-based commands that promise to make Bixby behave more like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant were delayed, at least in the U.S. (Bixby Voice is fully operational in South Korea, where Samsung is based.) Now the Korea Herald is reporting further delays to the English-speaking version of Bixby, apparently because Samsung can't amass the "big data" required for a good enough deep learning-based experience. Samsung's Bixby finally gets a voice -- sort of While Samsung recently granted early access to select S8 and S8 users who expressed interest in trying out Bixby Voice, me among them, I'm being kind to suggest that Bixby has a lot of catching up to do compared to its rivals.