Bixby is coming and it's going to be useful

[theelite1x87]

I barely use Google Assistant as it is. And that's a far more polished and robust product. Doubtful I'll even look at bixby until it's matured quite a bit.

 

[TheyCallMeBT]

I want to be able to tell my phone rather mundane tasks in normal language and it just do it.

Like while I'm heading to a job:
"Ok Google ... Pull up my most recent email from John Johnson. Find the address in it and navigate to it."

Or "Hey Siri ... Search memes about squirrels ... Now download that second one and text it to Amy."

Or "Yo Bixby ... Text my dad a Google Maps link to my current location." (Haven't tried this one, maybe it's possible with the correct syntax on some of them?)

Even something as simple as this, which I've tried before. If you travel for work much and often take backroads/ highways (not just interstates), you probably often do not know what city you are actually in. I've been driving through a small town that has a cute downtown area. And I looked around while following my GPS route for the name of the town, but no shops had it on the window and I was on the wrong side of the courthouse to see the name or whatever. And wanted to know the name for reference. Nothing important, it wasn't vital to anything. Not worth taking my eyes off the road and zooming out on Google Maps. But no variation of "What city am I currently in?" or "What is my current location" (while actively navigating) would work.

I'm not saying that I expect Tony Stark's Jarvis in my pocket right now (even the Iron Man 1 movie version). But with current voice assistant technology, it feels like it'll be more than ten years before even my first example is possible.

So I'm hopeful that Bixby will offer a leap from Ok Google, Siri, and Cortana. But I'm not optimistic.

 

[T48]

Hey, actually Sammy wouldn't have been bad haha. And it's 'unisex' enough so you can use male or female voices. I'm willing to give it a try (mostly because the effin' button is there), but if S-Voice is any indication of how Bixby will be and what Bixby cards are at the moment, I fear I'm sticking with Google's Assistant.

With exception to all those named Sam or Samantha. When their name is spoken, hey Sammy may respond. If there is a child out there named Bixby, there just might be other issues.

 

[AdamHLG]

I want to be able to tell my phone rather mundane tasks in normal language and it just do it.

Like while I'm heading to a job:
"Ok Google ... Pull up my most recent email from John Johnson. Find the address in it and navigate to it."

Or "Hey Siri ... Search memes about squirrels ... Now download that second one and text it to Amy."

Or "Yo Bixby ... Text my dad a Google Maps link to my current location." (Haven't tried this one, maybe it's possible with the correct syntax on some of them?)

Even something as simple as this, which I've tried before. If you travel for work much and often take backroads/ highways (not just interstates), you probably often do not know what city you are actually in. I've been driving through a small town that has a cute downtown area. And I looked around while following my GPS route for the name of the town, but no shops had it on the window and I was on the wrong side of the courthouse to see the name or whatever. And wanted to know the name for reference. Nothing important, it wasn't vital to anything. Not worth taking my eyes off the road and zooming out on Google Maps. But no variation of "What city am I currently in?" or "What is my current location" (while actively navigating) would work.

I'm not saying that I expect Tony Stark's Jarvis in my pocket right now (even the Iron Man 1 movie version). But with current voice assistant technology, it feels like it'll be more than ten years before even my first example is possible.

So I'm hopeful that Bixby will offer a leap from Ok Google, Siri, and Cortana. But I'm not optimistic.

So, this is 100 percent correct. The problem is, to get this level of AI, you need to have a) apps that ask for permission to export everything you ever do, for which you must grant permission, and b) you grant permission for every app on your phone to do this. And then let it track your GPS, spending, contacts, eyes on webpages via trackers, and basically every invasion of privacy known to mankind times a gazillion to do what you and I want it to do for us.

 

[TheyCallMeBT]

So, this is 100 percent correct. The problem is, to get this level of AI, you need to have a) apps that ask for permission to export everything you ever do, for which you must grant permission, and b) you grant permission for every app on your phone to do this. And then let it track your GPS, spending, contacts, eyes on webpages via trackers, and basically every invasion of privacy known to mankind times a gazillion to do what you and I want it to do for us.

Very good point. Makes me think of Samsung's fine print to not speak private information near one of its smart TVs.

Google's Voice Access app is actually the most excited I've been for something like this. It's not really an assistant, but rather an accessibility feature for people with dexterity problems. And it's still in dev. I guess for me, it all comes back to being able to use the phone for more than the basic while driving. And doing it safely. And this accomplished that pretty well for me. I never left it installed because it had a minor bug that I didn't want to have. But it's already pretty polished for being in development.

https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...apps.accessibility.voiceaccess&token=5wMRUU2m

 

[AdamHLG]

I remember trying that app a while back. It was pretty cool.

 

[flyingkytez]

With exception to all those named Sam or Samantha. When their name is spoken, hey Sammy may respond. If there is a child out there named Bixby, there just might be other issues.

S Voice was "Hi Galaxy!"

 

[Wbutchart]

I sue bixby now and really like it, it gives me way more at a glance information than google does. So I get:
News
Health updates
Step counter
Email
Weather
Schedule

Now all of that maybe available in some form in google now but I really like the layout of bixby. The other stuff, the visual scanner I couldn't care less about, the voice commands, well I'll wait and see, but at a glance information, it's on par for me with anything else which has always been my main use of cortana, google now (not Siri cause it can't do that).

 

[Keith929]

Cnn card shows news from September and doesn't refresh

 

[anon(7901790)]

Cnn card shows news from September and doesn't refresh

I've noticed that too. Mine shows news from March.

 

[kevinpleasants]

I've noticed that too. Mine shows news from March.

Mine also wouldn't refresh, but after the red tint update (which I didn't have) it now refreshes to current news.

 

[kevinpleasants]

Mine also wouldn't refresh, but after the red tint update (which I didn't have) it now refreshes to current news.

However, I just used it and CNN has gone back to March news and won't refresh.

 

[anon(7901790)]

Flipboard is working fine though.

 

[SpookDroid]

Bixby cards are too useless. Even the news ones are just three items, and two of them are highly condensed to provide context anyway.

 

[arunma]

I'm trying (note the present tense) to make use of Hello Bixby, but so far it doesn't seem to provide information as useful as Google Now/Assistant. As has been mentioned, I'm getting information on my emails, health stats, and some Flipboard news. I suppose it's mildly useful to have all of this in one place, but I was expecting from the Samsung press event that Hello Bixby would be providing me with context-specific info like traffic updates, restaurant recommendations, notifications when I have a package coming, etc.

Bixby's current implementation has been disappointing in other arenas too. I often dictate emails, text messages, etc. using voice typing. As per my use case, I wait for the Samsung keyboard to show up and then press the microphone button. The voice recognition service used to be provided by Google, and is now provided via Bixby. It's not nearly as good as Google at recognizing words spoken in my generic Midwestern American accent, and editing text that's already been spoken and transcribed is more cumbersome.

Finally we have Bixby Vision, which appears to be sub-par. I've yet to correctly identify a specific product. Bixby seems to get the general idea down. For example if I point it at a beer bottle it knows that I'm looking at beer, and will then give me more images of beer bottles. But it isn't able to do something so simple as figure out what brand of beer I'm looking at. This is especially amusing when I show Bixby an image of my Gear S3 on my wrist, and it shows me shopping results for Casio watches! Using a picture of a watch to show me more pictures of watches is a fairly basic implementation of modern deep learning techniques. It's impressive for a first year computer science grad student, but I'm expecting a lot more from a multinational tech company which supposedly has a whole team of data scientists and developers working on Bixby.

I'm greatly hoping that when Bixby voice is released, a lot of this will be improved as well. At least Samsung was smart enough to add the dedicated button. If it weren't there constantly reminding me of Bixby's presence, I would probably not have even used it for this long.

 

[Whiskey619]

Bixby vision is the most useful feature in what we have available now. It reads qr codes which just saves me one app that I don't have to install.