While we have long known that Samsung will be integrating an AI digital assistant on its next year’s flagship, the Galaxy S8, new reports suggest that the South Korean giant is also giving gender identity to the digital assistant. From what we knew all this while, was that Samsung’s assistant might be known has Bixby, but the latest rumor hints that Samsung has been recently granted trademarks for the names of both Bixby and Kestra, with Kestra being heavily speculated to being the assistant’s feminine alter ego.
In EU patent application, the description of the trademark rather clearly describes the nature of Bixby and Kestra, reading, “Computer software for enabling hands-free use of a mobile phone through voice recognition” and “Computer software used to process voice commands.” However, there is no official word from Samsung about Bixby and Kestra, probably the smart assistants will only debut when the Galaxy S8 is released in 2017.
Also, if you are wondering where the names Bixby and Kestra come from, roll back to the Star Trek world. For the ones who don’t know, Jerome Bixby is an American writer, who produced four screenplays for Star Trek episodes back in the 60s, while Kestra can be linked to Kestra Troi, the little sister of USS Enterprise’s ship counselor.
Rumors about Samsung‘s own virtual assistant began churning out a few weeks ago, after the South Korean company acquired Viv Labs, a California-based startup. The company is known for its development of intelligent interfaces that can be applied to everything, and most importantly, it is known for creating Apple’s Siri, which is now a part of Apple iPhones, iPads and the MacBooks too.
From everything that has been leaked or rumored about the Galaxy S8, the digital assistant has been the high point. While Samsung Galaxy smartphones already feature S Voice assistant, but it is not on par with its competitors. However, the AI assistant integration will help Samsung compete with the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.
A couple of weeks ago, we also found out, the Samsung Galaxy S8 will feature a button dedicated to launching the AI digital assistant. Essentially, rather than using just speech to fire up the device’s virtual assistant, Wall Street Journal reports that it is more likely that customers will be able to use a hardware shortcut button to trigger the feature. “The latest internal prototypes of the premium Galaxy S8 handset include a button on the side edge of the smartphone that would be used to launch a beefed-up virtual assistant,” says the report.
As for the Galaxy S8, we have quite a handful of leaks and rumors about it. The latest leak suggests that Samsung Galaxy S8 might feature a Xiaomi Mi MIX-like design. A recent report by The Investor suggested that the Galaxy S8 could feature a bezel-less, or edge-to-edge display and would be based on organic light-emitting diode technology.
The report further quotes Samsung’s Park Won-sang, a principal engineer at the display-making unit of Samsung, as saying, “Samsung Display would roll out a full-screen display whose display area ratio (a scale that measures space taken up by a display on the front part of a handset) reaches more than 90 percent next year.” He further said that Samsung may go for smartphones with display ratio up to 99 percent. As of now, smartphones have display area ratio around 80 percent.
Furthermore, Techtastic reports that the Samsung Galaxy S8 will sport 6GB of RAM. This is an upgrade from the 4GB RAM seen on predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S7. The Galaxy S8 is also rumoured to sport a 256GB storage variant. It is unclear whether this will be the only storage option, or one of the storage variants made available in the market. If Samsung follows tradition, then a separate microSD slot for further expansion of memory will also be offered with Galaxy S8. Just to put things into perspective, the predecessor was offered in 32GB and 64GB storage variants only. It may be powered by two chipsets – a Snapdragon 830 for the US and Exynos 8895 in other regions.
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