At IFA, Samsung mentioned that it would be working with Google with improve Bixby (a broad paraphrase). That got me thinking about what a potential collaboration could look like to improve the experience for Samsung users:
- Bixby could use Google STT. Google STT for US English is very good.
- Bixby could use WaveNet / Tacotron for better TTS. It’s unlikely that Google would give out an experience that was better than its own voice on Google Assistant — and Bixby in English isn’t bad — but maybe the technology could be used to make it even better.
- Bixby could use Google Assistant for non-phone related tasks.
- Bixby could expose more phone settings to Google Assistant for control.
- Any request initiated by the Bixby button and not addressable by the assistant should be passed to Google Assistant.
Maybe Bixby could open to more user customization, similar to Alexa Blueprints. It’ll be interesting to see how Google / Samsung manage this relationship.
