Samsung's new virtual assistant is called Sam and looks like a Pixar character, new promo images reveal. Brazil-based animation studios Lightfarm shared its renders of Sam online at the weekend before hastily taking them down. Sam will likely power Samsung's Galaxy powered smartphones and smart'things' like home appliances, as a replacement for Bixby, which Samsung revealed in 2017. Sam could also power Samsung's first commercially available smart speaker, which has been frustratingly delayed since it was first revealed in 2018. Digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri are disembodied voices that address users through devices like phones and speakers.

With a mere 24 hours before Samsung's Unpacked event, leaks of some of its soon-to-be-announced products are still rolling in. In a tweet sent out just three days before Samsung's major product event, Max Weinbach of XDA Developers, who has leaked several other major details about Samsung's forthcoming products, showed off real glimpses of the company's new smart speaker, the Galaxy Home Mini. A video of the smart speaker in action and corresponding literature for the Galaxy Home Mini offer insight into just what the product will do. According to images posted by Weinbach, among the capabilities will be the usual list of voice-activated queries like'what's the weather?' or'play Jazz music' in addition to a range of smart home controls. The sheet leaked by Weinbach also suggests that users will be able to summon Samsung's voice-assistant Bixby to change smart thermostats, turn devices off or on, or with applicable hardware, even change the channel on a TV.

Samsung's Bixby assistant won't be the reason you buy (or don't buy) your next Samsung-manufactured smartphone, smart refrigerator, smart router, or smart speaker. And Samsung is finally coming to terms with that. This was the implicit thread underlying the 2019 Samsung Developer Conference (SDC), which kicked off in earnest on Tuesday at the San Jose Convention Center. Unlike last year, when Samsung announced new languages for Bixby (German, French, Italian, and Spanish), plus Bixby Marketplace for third-party voice apps, this year's enhancements were on the whole understated. Bixby Templates and Bixby Views make it easier for developers to create capsules (apps, in Samsung's vernacular) across a range of devices, while Natural Language Categories enable Bixby to recommend apps by context instead of name. But two keynotes came and went without so much as a mention of the Galaxy Home, a Bixby-powered smart speaker that Samsung announced last August alongside the Galaxy Note9.