Sources: Samsung will share more details about its foldable screen phone and open Bixby to third-party developers at its developer conference next week
New features for Bixby are meant to challenge the dominance of Apple, Amazon and Alphabet in artificial intelligence
Context & Ripple Effects
Bixby has been a closed system since it shipped alongside the curved-screen Galaxy S8 in 2017, and Samsung has been telegraphing the opening for months — it said in September it would let developers build Bixby apps later this year. Next week's developer conference is where that promise becomes concrete: an SDK, five new languages, and more detail on the foldable screen phone that gives the assistant new hardware to live on.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers get direct SDK access to Bixby for the first time, turning a device-bundled feature into a platform they can build on.
- Samsung formally positions Bixby against Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Alphabet's Assistant, whose dominance in AI assistants the company says the new features are meant to challenge.
Second-order effects
- Amazon, Apple and Alphabet face a fourth large-scale Android distribution channel courting their developer ecosystems, raising the competition for third-party skills and integrations.
- The foldable phone becomes the differentiating surface for Bixby — if Samsung ships a working foldable, as it has since planned to unveil in February, the assistant gets form-factor use cases rivals can't match on standard slabs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, assistant competition shifts from who has the most users to who controls the most open developer platform across the widest range of device shapes — hardware makers using openness to compensate for weaker AI mindshare.
The trend: Device makers are opening proprietary voice assistants to third-party developers and pairing them with novel hardware form factors to break the Apple-Amazon-Alphabet hold on AI assistants.