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Samsung Launches the Bixby Marketplace to Offer Third-party Capsules

After Apple’s Siri became popular as the smart assistant for iPhones, other rival companies, including Google, also started working to bring their own smart assistants for their mobile users. Though Google brought Google Assistant for Android, other companies focused on bringing smart assistants for homes. This way, Amazon introduced ‘Alexa’, Microsoft brought ‘Cortana’, and Google chose to expand its Android assistant, Google Assistant, as the home assistant. Samsung too, following the league, finally, launched Bixby.

Bixby
Image Source: xda-developers.com

Being a bit late, the smart assistant from Samsung could not make the mark. But Samsung had to do something, so it introduced third-party integration to Bixby and opened the platform for third-party developers. Opening Bixby for third-party developers was a great idea as it started getting the updates that Samsung had promised while launching the app. But still, the company need to do a lot more to get the product to success.

For the same, the company has launched a new marketplace, called ‘Bixby Marketplace’, where the users will get the ‘Bixby capsules.’ The capsules are nothing but the services that Bixby will be providing to its users with third-party app integration on their voice instructions. The popular third-party apps, including Spotify, Yelp, YouTube, NPR, iHeartRadio, and Google Maps, have already been made available as capsule through the store. And, Samsung has claimed that it will also bring the other famous and useful capsule to the platform in the coming future.

“To add even more customization, users can set a capsule as the ‘preferred capsule’ for certain types of requests. For example, if a user says ‘Get me a ride to San Francisco airport’, Bixby will prompt the user to pick one of the supported Rideshare capsules. Users will have the option to set their favourite provider as their preferred Rideshare capsule. Once that is set, any Rideshare request would automatically go to the user’s preferred provider, even if the user does not mention the capsule name. The ability for users to customize their own personal Bixby experience allows them to easily incorporate a wide range of capsules into their everyday lives.” Samsung said during the launch announcement.

The Bixby Marketplace is already opened for the U.S., South Korea and Spain users. The company is looking forward to luring more users to Bixby and has also integrated the smart assistant to many of its home appliances, including its smart TVs.

Samsung’s $300 Bixby Smart Speaker to be Launched by the End of the Year

Samsung Galaxy Home Speaker
Image Source: hiconsumption.com

Following the lead of its rivals, Apple, Microsoft and Google, Samsung has announced the launch of its new smart speaker Galaxy Home powered by Bixby. Bixby was released by Samsung last year, which is a voice robot embedded in a few of the smartphones and home appliances of Samsung, which is similar to the Google assistant and Apple’s infamous Siri. The automated smart speaker by Samsung will provide a surround sound and can be controlled manually or by voice commands.

1. Design: Since the announcement of the Galaxy Home speaker there has been a chaos about the look of the speakers. Some have compared it with a witch’s cauldron, a fondue pot and also with a backyard grill. It has a three-legged stand and is equipped with eight far-field microphones, to take the commands from the user. It has full-range speakers and an onboard subwoofer for surround sound, with a sound steering and audio tuning by AKG. The size of the Galaxy Home is considerably space-age and larger than Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa.

2. Cost: As Galaxy Home is competing with its contemporaries Google, Apple and Amazon, that are already are at the higher end of the prices ranging from $250 to $400. The price of Samsung Galaxy Home is yet be announced but is expected to be around $300. Before galaxy Home, Samsung has launched the Alexa-powered Samsung VL350 that cost $250.

Samsung is ready to give a tough competition to its competitors now in the music and speaker industry. Also, it has announced a partnership with Spotify and will add the live music streaming to Galaxy Home. The other features, launch date and the price of the Galaxy Home smart speakers will be announced in its Developer’s conference in the November month of this year, until then we can only guess what it will bring different from other smart speakers.