Samsung is betting its future on Bixby, but that might be a bad idea

Samsung has a big problem.

No, it’s not just the Galaxy Note 9 is an incremental update. Or that the Galaxy Watch is no Apple Watch. Or that we barely know anything about the Galaxy Home smart speaker.

It’s Bixby. 

At its summer Unpacked event, Samsung made it clear injecting AI into its products is a key way of differentiating its products from the competition. 

“At Samsung we believe it’s time to transcend narrow digital experiences,” said DJ Koh, Samsung’s mobile chief. “It’s time for a new generation of intelligence to anticipate your needs.”

But if intelligence will be as core to Samsung’s products as Koh says, I’m already worried. That’s because Samsung’s AI foundation, Bixby, is still seriously lacking compared to the Google Assistant, Alexa, and even Siri. 

Let’s start with the Galaxy Note 9. Samsung’s new flagship phone looks like a total monster. It’s packed to the gills with the fastest Qualcomm processor, a huge 4,000 mAh battery, and the top-tier model has a whopping 512GB of internal storage. Not to mention the S Pen can be used as a handy wireless remote for things like taking selfies.

But what’s up with the Bixby integration? Sure, there’s still a dedicated Bixby button on the left side of the phone, but the improvements in Bixby 2.0 can hardly be called game-changing. 

Samsung says Bixby 2.0 will bring faster request processing and the company showed the digital assistant’s new Uber-hailing, restaurant-reserving, and Spotify-controlling capabilities. But none of these leapfrog the other assistants — it’s just catch up to things Google Assistant and Alexa already do.

If Samsung really wanted to showcase the power of AI and how essential it is, there would have been no better product to do so with than its most powerful phone. But instead all Note 9 users get is what looks to be a marginally better Bixby. Which means most people will probably end up disabling it.

And then there’s Samsung’s Galaxy Home. I’m calling it now: That thing is dead on arrival. Not only is the cauldron-like smart speaker big (it’s like 1.5x the size of a HomePod), it is powered by Bixby. 

Knowing how poor Bixby often is on Samsung’s phones, I can only imagine how similarly awful it’ll be on a smart speaker that has no display to provide visual feedback when it inevitably fails to understand a voice request. 

The HomePod gets a lot of flak because Siri’s features are so inferior (it can’t even set multiple timers) to the Google Assistant and Alexa, but Bixby is arguably the worst digital assistant.

To be fair, nobody at Unpacked got to try out the Galaxy Home — Samsung only had a non-functional devices on display — but even so I don’t have a lot of confidence in Bixby based on past experiences.

Samsung’s doubling-down on Bixby might ultimately end up hurting the company in the long run. It’s admirable Samsung is trying to build an ecosystem of products with Bixby as the connective tissue tying them all together to help users live a smarter and more convenient life.

But Bixby’s weak capabilities are holding all of Samsung’s products back. Even though it’s still early days (Bixby’s only about 1.5 years old) consumers are starting to choose sides, whether they realize it or not. 

You’re looking at peripheral devices (i.e. smartwatches and smart speakers) and seeing which ones have the AI platform that works best with your phones. You’re no longer just buying a singular product, but an entire expandable ecosystem.

With that said, I fear Samsung’s betting on the wrong AI to connect its devices. If Bixby ends up becoming a huge failure — it’s already trailing behind its rivals and is considered a dud by many people — Samsung’s whole ecosystem of connected devices falls apart.

Perhaps Samsung should consider putting its eggs in the Google Assistant basket, where the AI is significantly smarter and the ecosystem of devices and services continues to grow larger than Bixby’s ever will. Supporting Alexa is another option.

As a consumer, there’s simply no incentive for me to buy into the Bixby ecosystem when Samsung has yet to prove the AI is worth using.

Not everyone agrees that the time’s up for Bixby. “I think Samsung can do good machine learning but I remain to be convinced about their AI approach,” says Carolina Milanesi, an analyst with Creative Strategies. 

“Samsung is good at understanding my habits on devices, but I am not sure how good they are in understanding me when it comes to services, apps, shopping and so on. This is a problem that others have at some level, but Samsung seems the one with more blindspots.”

Milanesi makes a good point. Both the Google Assistant and Alexa are smarter when it comes to services. Again, because they continue to expand with more third-party support every day. Who knows when Bixby will catch up to them in this respect.

Samsung’s a stubborn company and it will probably stick it out with Bixby. It certainly has the resources. But resources aren’t everything; Apple had a jump on everyone with Siri and it still hasn’t caught up in many key ways. 

From where I stand, it’s hard to see a future where Bixby is radically smarter and has a healthy and worthwhile ecosystem of devices unless Samsung takes drastic measures to improve things.