#CES2019 – Samsung has tossed their hat into the digital assistant ring when they launched Bixby, although initial impressions of the software weren’t particularly positive as many felt it was still lacking. However at CES 2019, Samsung announced that they would be expanding Bixby’s capabilities thanks to partnerships with various tech companies such as Google.According to Samsung, this means that in the future, you will be able to use Bixby together with a variety of Google’s services including Google Play, Google Maps, and YouTube, just to name a few. Samsung also announced that iHeartRadio had joined them as a new partner, so those who use iHeartRadio will now be able to use Bixby with the streaming service as well.
Like we said, Bixby wasn’t too well received at the start due to its lack of functionality. This is versus other services such as Amazon who were pretty quick from the get-go where they opened up Alexa to third-party developers, thus allowing it to be quickly developed for and expanded.
Samsung had announced last year that they too would be opening Bixby up, so we guess only time will tell if it will become widely adopted the same way Alexa was. According to Samsung, “Bixby started as a smarter way to use your Galaxy phone. Today, it is evolving to become a scalable, open AI platform that will support more and more devices.”
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