Bixby can be quite useful, if you’re patient

There’s a smartphone equivalent to the proverbial how-many-lightbulbs question…

How many virtual assistants does it take to make a phone work? With Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Alexa making up quite a kitty party of assistants, did we really need another?

Samsung thinks so. Starting with the Galaxy 8 flagships, Samsung has debuted its own smart assistant, Bixby. There’s one thing for sure: Samsung deserves credit for having the courage to get into the assistant space when all the others have such a head-start and are already overlapping with each other in what they can do.

But using Bixby for a few days has made the biggest difference between it and the others clear — Bixby is very much more on-phone and in-app while the rest are more ‘out there’. Siri and Cortana also handle tasks that are very much integrated on a device, but Bixby a little more so and in some unique ways, which is why it’s just about possible for it to co-exist with Google Assistant on a Samsung flagship phone.

Bixby is built to be ‘multimodal’ and works with its own home screen, through its Vision feature and as Bixby Voice. To underline the fact that Samsung is dead serious about seeding and developing Bixby into the future, the company has given the assistant its own physical button, on the left edge of the phone. Press it and the Bixby screen comes up. This is so annoying because it’s pressed accidentally many times a day, that Samsung has just allowed users to disable the trigger and choose to have no action on pressing the key. Instead, a press and hold calls up Bixby Voice — and that’s a lot more interesting.

I tested Bixby on the Note 8, which is a high involvement device even without the assistant. It’s a doer’s phone, not just for someone who wants to use a device for the basics. Bixby adds to that. As it sets up, Bixby asks you a lot of questions and gets you to read out sentences and phrases to capture your voice signature. You can even lock and unlock your phone with a phrase. Right at the outset though, Bixby tells you that it — or she — is still learning. Which is true enough.

Once it’s set up, you can ask Bixby to do 3,000 things — and counting. But there’s a steep learning curve here, both for Bixby and the user. You have to say things in a way it will understand or some confusion will ensue. Ask “What’s the news today?” and it will come back with “Today is Saturday”. But updates are evolving the understanding rather fast. When I began using it, Bixby would not respond to “What’s the time?” and would only understand “What time is it?” Already, this has changed. So, spend some time looking through commands to get the feel of how it will understand what you want and you’ll be surprised at how the assistant can actually take very specific action. For instance you can say: Open Gallery and copy the three most recent pictures to the Vacations album. That’s what Siri and Google Assistant will find tough to do.

Because you can create and store commands for Bixby, you can daisy chain them to set up a whole set of actions. For instance, I set the phrase Going Out to do a number of things — set the brightness level to 80 per cent, turn mobile data on, call my driver on speaker, and open up Maps. All with one phrase. But the chain took a while to set up. I realised the mobile data settings page was covering the Maps app, for instance. I had to go back in and make sure I ticked the option to hide away the screens I didn’t want. All the same, I now use my Going Out command all the time for this series of actions.

There’s a list of simple commands as well, and you can find these in ‘My Bixby’ from the settings on Bixby Home.

I found the Bixby home screen a little annoying. It has duplicated information and items that you reject keep popping back. For example, I chose not to see LinkedIn news there and said so a few dozen times. But every now and then, the option returns. Weather shows up in my calendar and in the weather forecast box, taking up space. News is not from your choice of sources. Frequently-used apps are not representative of what I use the most and most-visited websites include some I haven’t even seen. In the end it’s a bit too crowded, even though you can banish some sections. This too is a feature you will have to customise for yourself if you want to make it useful to you all the time.

Bixby is obviously still in its infancy. But it’s a lot of fun to use and if you’re willing to spend some time with it, can help shorten a bunch of things you do habitually to a mere phrase. Because it works inside apps (not all, but many) it’s able to extend its functionality to make many things easier. But a lot of things are frustratingly missing or require you to look and tap and so on when you really want to avoid that, which is why you’re using voice commands in the first place. You can’t ask it to give you a morning briefing, news included for example. The news app it needs to connect to is missing from the Samsung store. You can’t get it to read a screen, though it can read messages.

Overall, the integration that goes right into the device and apps is a great direction for a virtual assistant to take and if taken forward and fine-tuned, Bixby should be an excellent addition to the world of virtual assistants.