
Samsung opens its Bixby assistant to developers - breck
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/07/samsung-opens-its-bixby-assistant-to-developers/
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chipotle_coyote
Bixby as presented at SDC today is built on a different platform than the
Bixby most people are familiar with. (The new Bixby is the work of Samsung-
owned Viv Labs.)

It really is an interesting platform that’s worth playing around with. You
essentially define a set of “concepts and actions” (objects and functions,
effectively), and then give Bixby example sentences for natural language
training that specify which words represent input concepts and what the goal
is (for instance, an action like “BookUber” or “FindHotel”), and Bixby
dynamically generates the program for you, including adding steps on its own
to prompt the user for missing information (i.e, you say “book a table at The
French Laundry next Saturday at 7” and it knows it needs to ask you “for how
many”). You can easily teach Bixby about context and continuing conversation,
so you could say “change the reservation to Sunday” and it would know what you
were talking about. And, it can even learn the user’s preferred defaults over
time, so if you usually specify a table for two, it assumes that’s what you
mean. (You’d be able to change that on a confirmation screen before it books
anything, of course.)

Full disclosure: I’m a tech writer at Viv Labs, so I’m absolutely biased. :)
But I acquired this bias from working with the product.

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akhilcacharya
I thought Bixby was always based on Viv tech? Was it just in-house pre-
acquisition stuff before?

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lozaning
We all agreed a long time ago to never talk about S voice again.

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julianh95
My experience with Bixby has been mixed as I am not too fond of the leveling
system they have in place. However, I recently got a Samsung TV that has Bixby
integrated and I dig it for the small tasks it can accomplish well such as
changing the TV input selection. I can't wait to give the dev stuff a try!

On an unrelated note, I am pretty upset that my Samsung ~$1200 TV has ads
built into it.

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elyobo
I'm annoyed that smart TVs are a thing; it's like having a smart monitor, it
just doesn't make sense. I'd rather have a beautiful dumb display that I can
plug in to the smart part, allowing the (relatively cheap) smart part to be
upgraded without having to upgrade the (relatively expensive) display part.

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mfoy_
Yeah, but it's pretty much impossible to find not-smart TVs. :(

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kimburgess
It comes up nearly every time this topic is discussed here, but commercial
series displays are what you are looking for. Prepare to pay more, but in
exchange get a display that just functions as a display.

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rocqua
Paying more for fewer features doesn't make sense though. I'm also guessing
the commercial displays also are tuned more for endurance and less for
quality.

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porphyrogene
The pricing makes sense. Demand dictates price, not features. Products
catering to a smaller market tend to cost more, especially if you are buying
individual units from a supplier who usually sells in bulk.

LG's IT line[1] is not unreasonable in terms of pricing, especially if the
purchaser is also paying the electric bill, demands long-lasting color
accuracy or otherwise wants a purpose-built solution. I have not used one and
I don't know if budget display manufacturers like TCL and Vizio have
comparable products.

1\. [https://www.lg.com/us/business/commercial-display/it-
product...](https://www.lg.com/us/business/commercial-display/it-products)

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ric2b
> The pricing makes sense. Demand dictates price, not features.

Sure, but lower demand would usually mean lower price, unless the consumers
are willing to pay extra for something that other products are missing. In
this case, I'm not sure what the other products are missing in comparison, but
I'm also not familiar with these TV's.

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tk75x
Does this mean we can finally turn off the dedicated physical button or
repurpose it? I'm not holding my breath.

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stronglikedan
I turned it off in the Bixby settings on my S8. I tried repurposing, but
nothing worked reliably for too long, so I decided to just nix it.

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XCSme
Were you able to turn it off without signing up for a Samsung Account and
accepting hundreds of pages of ToS?

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rocqua
I was up to a point, except that a really long press of the button still goes
to bixby.

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stronglikedan
Yeah, the long press opens up the 'Bixby Voice' to accept voice input. Happens
even when the phone is locked. A bit annoying, but thankfully rare.

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tootie
Is there still a lot of energy being devoted to voice assistants? We seem to
have hit a very deep trough on the hype cycle. And I'm not really surprised.

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intopieces
Yes. They are a very big bet for Apple, Google, Samsung, and Amazon. Nearly
half of Americans use them, mostly on their phones [0].

[0] [https://www.google.com/amp/www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/201...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2017/12/12/nearly-half-of-americans-use-digital-voice-assistants-mostly-
on-their-smartphones/)

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earth2mars
who cares

