Samsung’s Bixby Gets AI Makeover: Generative AI Integration to Rival Apple’s Siri Upgrade
Samsung Head of Mobile TM Roh said the company plans to upgrade Bixby later this year. Photo by Mairo Cinquetti/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Key Takeaways
- Samsung is set to upgrade its Bixby smartphone assistant with generative AI later this year.
- The development follows Apple’s move to integrate Siri with ChatGPT.
- In the race for AI dominance, the two smartphone manufacturers have charted different courses.
Among the world’s major smartphone manufacturers, approaches to integrating AI have diverged between two paths, as seen in the large language models (LLMs) adopted by the two largest players: Apple and Samsung.
Apple’s approach outsources LLM development to OpenAI, integrating ChatGPT with Siri as part of a broad AI upgrade dubbed Apple Intelligence. Meanwhile, Samsung has opted to continue building its mobile voice assistant in-house, boosting Bixby’s capabilities with its own proprietary AI model.
Samsung Announces AI-Enhanced Bixby
In comments made to CNBC Samsung Mobile CEO TM Roh confirmed that the company will release an upgraded Bixby later this year powered by Samsung’s own AI model. “We’re going to advance Bixby with application of Gen AI technology,” he said.
Although the firm hasn’t disclosed the exact model that will be integrated with Bixby, one possibility is that it deploys a custom version of Samsung Gauss .
Unveiled by Samsung research last November, Gauss is really three models bundled together, including components that generate natural language, computer code and images.
The multi-modal approach to AI embodied by Samsung Gauss is in line with contemporary AI trends and multi-modality was a major theme of the Galaxy Unpacked event on Wednesday.
Samsung’s biggest rival in the smartphone market, Apple, has also experimented with multi-modal AI models, unveiling the MM1 family of models capable of handling images and text in March.
For now, however, Apple’s AI strategy relies on a partnership with OpenAI and multimodal iOS and Siri features come courtesy of GPT-4.
Bixby vs. Siri in the Age of AI
With the world’s largest smartphone manufacturers both reinventing their respective virtual assistants, the long-running competition between them has entered a new stage.
Rebuilding Bixby with an LLM developed in-house means Samsung will retain important engineering autonomy that Apple may end up ceding to OpenAI if Siri becomes nothing more than a ChatGPT bot for iPhones.
However, although such an end may seem likely given OpenAI’s significant headstart in LLM development, Siri hasn’t lost its independence yet.
For now, ChatGPT is an external tool that’s only used when Siri isn’t capable of completing a task by itself. Moreover, technical documents for Apple Intelligence suggest the firm is still heavily invested in its own foundation models and may even integrate other third-party models further down the line.
What About Gemini?
Samsung’s DIY approach to Bixby contrasts with Siri’s combination of GPT-4 and Apple’s homegrown AI. But Samsung Galaxy users also have access to Google’s AI agents.
In fact, while Bixby didn’t even earn a mention at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event on Wednesday, July 10, significant attention was paid to Gemini, which has superseded Google Assistant as the default virtual assistant on Android.
Although there are still some areas where Bixby has the edge, Google Vice President for Gemini Experiences Jenny Blackburn took to the stage on Wednesday to showcase how the AI platform is now “deeply integrated” into Samsung smartphones.
Under the banner of Galaxy AI, Samsung is promoting multimodal features like Circle to Search, live translation across text and voice, and a suite of AI photo editing tools.
Just as Apple Intelligence augments Apple’s AI models with those built by OpenAI, Galaxy AI makes use of Samsung’s proprietary solutions and those developed by Google.
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