Samsung, today at its developer conference in San Francisco, announced their updated digital voice assistant, dubbed Bixby 2.0. The new Bixby 2.0 update is geared towards smart home devices, and is now open to third-party developers. The company now wants to position itself and Bixby as a new competitor to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.
Samsung states that Bixby will now be even more capable of processing natural language and predicting users needs, no matter what device it’s running on. The company is following the same path that both Amazon and Google are following: locking down users on their own hardware and software ecosystems.
Samsung says that Bixby will “act as the control hub of your device ecosystem,” which includes refrigerators, speakers, TVs, and of course, phones, among other devices. Bixby 2.0 is open to developers to build and plug in existing apps and services. The company has released a new Bixby software development kit to developers in beta.
