Later this year, third-party developers will be granted Samsung’s permission in a bid to develop apps for Bixby voice assistant in order to enhance its abilities, the CEO of powerful tech company’s mobile department informed.
The news came in after the announcement of the Galaxy Home smart speaker by Samsung last month. This announcement was to compete with Google Home and Amazon Echo and now it will have an integrated Bixby for consumers, they can command it to perform certain operations and ask it any queries.
However, Bixby is the latest release and much advanced voice assistant than its competitors Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. As a consequence, Samsung wants to increase its sale by consulting developers.
Samsung will launch a “software developer kit” (SDK) and an “application programming interface” (API), DJ Koh, CEO of Samsung’s mobile department said. Developers will be able to create apps with Bixby using SDK, whereas API will permit the integration of Bixby with other apps. He further added that in the coming November in San Francisco, these updates would be launched in Samsung Developer Conference.
In the smartphone marketplace, Samsung is making an effort to distinguish its products from the Apple’s and Huawei’s, which are its current biggest competitors. A smart voice assistant can be the approach to achieve that, especially as currently Samsung is encountering a decline in its smartphone market sales. The Note 9 released in the last month came with the new Bixby 2.0.
“Opening the ecosystem in November, then this baby (Bixby) will grow,” Koh said last week. “So I do not want to see just six months or nine months performance, no. Because this is like a long journey; it’s just starting because with the new Bixby embedded in the Note 9, a new baby was born.”
DJ Koh added that as developers are making more apps integrated with Bixby; this will assist the voice assistant to learn more and grow.
Samsung is getting inspiration from Amazon, which at present has a kit that can be used by developers to make apps or “skills” for Alexa and currently more than 30,000 have been made. Samsung will want its Bixby kit to get purchased in order to increase the sales of its service and software side in the middle of a decline in its hardware side business sales. Being the world’s biggest cell phone manufacturer, Samsung has a reputation that can assist it in alluring the developers to make them come on board.
Samsung, major player of South Korean electronics’ industry, has not yet disclosed the price of its Galaxy Home smart speaker but DJ Koh claimed that Bixby would have “competitive, affordable price”.
