Samsung’s new Bixby Marketplace finally makes the voice assistant usable
Samsung has just launched the new Bixby Marketplace in the US and South Korea, giving its users a new reason to give Bixby a try. The Bixby Marketplace is filled with capsules which give the voice assistant hooks into other apps, allowing it to do things it couldn’t do before. Think of it like adding new skills to Alexa.
A few examples of the new functionality include the ability to use Bixby to search the Play Store, ask YouTube to play a specific video or set your preferred ride-hauling app as the default so that you can simply say “get me a ride to work” without having to specify Uber or Lyft.
For now, the Bixby Marketplace capsules available are limited to what Samsung has developed, but the company plans to open the Bixby Marketplace to third-party developers in the future. Samsung hasn’t revealed the full extent of capabilities that Bixby Marketplace capsules will be able to have, but it has promised that it will share more details at the Samsung Developer Conference in late October.
Up until now, Bixby hasn’t gained a lot of traction. While these new capsules will allow Bixby to expand is functionality, having to browse a marketplace to ad install specific capsules to do so may be more work than some users are willing to put in when Google Assistant simply works right out of the box.
Source: Samsung