Article by Sunggy Koo, Samsung Electronics vice president of smart appliance AI, where are we now and where are we going? Since it was first envisioned in the 1950s, AI has made a palpable impact on our lives, giving us practical speech recognition, more effective web search and self-driving cars, among other innovations. Earlier this month, Google's AlphaGo AI program made news by mastering the ancient Chinese board game Go in just three days without any human assistance. This major advance comes just two decades after Deep Blue crushed chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, illustrating that AI has not only come a long way in a short time but is on track to creating unthinkable opportunities across all industries that will add new value to our lives. The recent explosion in AI is enabled by a number of factors including a wider availability of GPUs, virtually infinite amounts of data, and more advanced machine and deep learning algorithms.

The concept of virtual assistance has been in consumers' mind for more than half a century, first introduced through Sci-Fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) featuring virtual assistant HAL and infamous quote "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Portrayed as a must-have feature by the consumer tech industry, our research at Ovum shows that digital assistants, in fact, fall short of consumer expectations and can't do what they want. A survey conducted by Ovum in the UK and the US in May 2017 revealed that more than 50 percent of consumers don't find digital assistants useful (see Figure 1). The digital assistant population will equal today's human population in 2021. Instead, Google Assistant will dominate the native (i.e.

Samsung's Bixby voice assistant for the Galaxy S8 and galaxy S8 Plus is finally available worldwide. Bixby Voice is now being rolled out to more than 200 countries. Unfortunately, the service will only work in English and Korean languages for now. "Now millions of customers worldwide have access to a new and intelligent way of interacting with their phone," executive VP and head of R&D for Samsung's Mobile Business Injong Rhee said. "The expansion of Bixby's voice capabilities is an initial step in the continued rollout of Bixby functionality. In the future, Bixby will have the learning power to offer more intelligent and personalized interactions and seamless connections across more devices."

The Samsung Galaxy S8 has been on the market since late-April and its highlight feature, Bixby Voice has finally been implemented onto the device in the U.S. market. The artificial intelligence update is rolling onto Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 handsets over-the-air, adding to the overall platform, the ability to instruct the handset to execute functions with one's voice. Bixby serves as Samsung answer to other AI assistants such as Siri, from Apple, Alexa from Amazon and Google Assistant. In addition to Bixby Voice, the assistant includes features such as the Hello Bixby Hub, which serves as a hub for vital information for those using a Bixby enabled handset, Bixby Reminders, which learns user's patterns and sets automatic reminders, and Bixby Vision, which uses the Galaxy S8 camera app as a machine learning identification tool to pull information about products, places or things or even translate text. The latter three features were enabled on Bixby when the Galaxy S9 launched; however, Bixby Voice was delayed due to Samsung having issues implementing English speech recognition onto the platform.

Big data is a big deal. The full launch of the English version of Samsung's Bixby voice control interface for the Galaxy S8 is still in a holding pattern, after originally expecting to launch in June. The delay comes from a handful of issues with the service but is driven by a lack of usage data that's ultimately required for the machine learning systems to work at their full potential. Although the service is already available in Samsung's home country of South Korea, evolving Bixby for use with U.S. English is proving tougher. Because of the vast number of potential commands and numerous pathways to accomplish those commands within the interface and apps on a phone, the only realistic way to make it all work is for machine learning algorithms to process large amounts of data and determine those links automatically. Samsung's engineers can of course set them on the right path, but in the end, you need real-world usage data to show the algorithms how people are using the service and how to best accomplish the commands.

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.

Now select users will get to test it. One of the most anticipated new features of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 prior to the phone's launch in March was an artificial intelligence assistant named Bixby that you were supposed to be able to control by voice. Unfortunately while some of Bixby's capabilities made into onto the phones, the voice-based commands that would make Bixby respond more like the Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa was delayed, at least in the U.S. (Bixby is fully operational in South Korea, where Samsung is based). On Friday, Samsung Electronics America announced it will give "select" Galaxy S8 and S8 users early access to Bixby's vocal capabilities as part of what it still considered an early preview test. Samsung hasn't disclosed how many Bixby testers will gain access to this sneak preview, which will let you hold down a Bixby button and start speaking to get the phone to send texts, change settings and make calls.

The Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus have been on the market for just over one month and continue to be a hot topic among smartphone enthusiasts. Whether it's Samsung celebrating favorable sales of the handsets or hackers attempting to spoof the device's iris scanner, there is still a lot to say about the Galaxy S8. The smartphone introduces to Samsung's line a new design and new software features, such as the AI assistant Bixby. It also touts several feature improvements, including a sharper and faster camera and more efficient processors. Whether the Galaxy S8 is worth the buy is completely up to the consumer; however, there are many things to take into consideration when selecting a new premium smartphone. The Samsung Galaxy S8 is a beautiful smartphone. It stands out during a time when mobile devices have become just ubiquitous enough for many consumers to not care about design, and would rather just have a functional device.

One of the marquee features of the Galaxy S8 is Bixby, Samsung's response to the Siris, Google Assistants, and Cortanas of the world. Billed as "a new way to interact with your phone," Samsung has gone so far as to add a dedicated button on the side of the phone to summon its new assistant, and has integrated it deeply into the S8's interface. There's just one problem: You won't be able to talk to Bixby at launch. In a statement released about a week before the S8 is set to hit shelves, Samsung confirmed that its new AI assistant will be missing a key component. While it will support Vision, Home and Reminder when it launches on April 21, Bixby Voice won't be included on U.S. models.

The Samsung Galaxy S8 will ship without voice control for its virtual assistant, Bixby. Samsung has huge ambitions for the new feature, which it calls an "intelligent interface". The company believes it could completely change the way consumers interact with their devices, and has even equipped the S8 with a physical Bixby button. Bixby will still run on the S8 and S8 Plus when the smartphones start shipping to customers in the UK later this month, but not to its full potential. Bixby Voice works in a similar manner to Apple's Siri, allowing users to control their handset with spoken commands. There was some confusion about Bixby Voice ahead of the launch of the S8, with Samsung initially saying that it wouldn't be available in the UK right away.