If there is one reason why Amazon’s Alexa has gained so much traction and so quickly, it is thanks to Amazon who decided early on to open Alexa up to outside developers, where it was integrated into a variety of products. Now it looks like Samsung could be thinking of adopting a similar strategy for its own digital assistant, Bixby.
A report from The Wall Street Journal (via Engadget) has revealed that Samsung will apparently make the announcement next week during the Samsung Developer Conference in which the company is also expected to show off its foldable smartphone. The company will also show developers how they’ll be able to create Alexa-like skills for Bixby, which are known as “capsules”, which we imagine should help make the digital assistant more useful.
As it stands market research has found that Alexa is currently dominating the digital assistant market where 24% of Americans use it. Google Assistant isn’t too far behind at 20%, whereas Samsung’s Bixby is sitting at a very low 6%. It also seems that developers aren’t exactly falling over themselves to develop for Bixby either.
An email obtained by WSJ revealed that Samsung had apparently offered the first 50 developers $500 to create “capsules” for Bixby, but only 30 had signed up at the start, but that number has since climbed to 46 which is still not particularly encouraging.