Samsung opens up Bixby voice assistant to developers

Samsung has opened up its Bixby platform, allowing third party developers to build functionalities for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant.

Bixby started as a practical way to use voice to interact with the phone. Now, it is evolving into a scalable, open AI platform to support many devices, including fridge and TVs.

At Samsung Developer Conference 2018 here, the South Korean tech giant announced the opening of Bixby Developer Studio, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), to developers. 

It offers access to the same development tools Samsung's internal developers use to create Bixby Capsules, which is what developers build to add features to Bixby. 

Samsung on Wednesday said the move was in line with the company's goal of building a scalable, open Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform where developers and service providers can access tools to bring Bixby to more people and devices around the world.

"Our goal is to offer developers a robust, scalable and open AI platform that makes it easy for them to launch and evolve the amazing experiences they create for our users," said Kyunghak Hyun, Product Manager of the AI Product Management Group at Samsung. 

"As Samsung's ecosystem of devices continues to grow, it creates more points of contact not just for Bixby, but for a growing number of third-party services as well. Developers have more ways to reach users, and users get more opportunities to make the most of them," Kyunghak said. 

As part of its efforts to scale Bixby services, Samsung said it would expand support to five new languages in the coming months, including British English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.-IANS