Bixby Views and Touch

Saw Bixby early on, was not impressed.   Is it now emerging?  Touch it says will be included, which I did not see.

Bixby Views is What Every Voice Developer Wants and Reinforces Samsung’s Biggest Differentiator
  By Bret Kensella,  by Voicebot.ai

Putting Bixby on other Samsung devices particularly the refrigerators…I think that is the competitive edge Samsung has over the other competitors…More often than not, consumers have a Samsung appliance inside their home. If they buy a new one that is Bixby enabled then they have the interface right on their device versus adding a plugin.

Developers Realize Zero UI is a Myth

The idea of Zero UI and its potential to reduce developer time has turned out to be a myth. Voice is a UI and it is complex to design it well. With that said, there was a hope that with voice apps at least developers could avoid the complexities of graphical user interfaces (GUI) that invariably need to be ported to dozens or hundreds of form factors. The thinking was that a speaker and microphone are essentially the same on all devices, so we have the result of “write once; publish everywhere.”

But, those voice-only experiences didn’t last for long. Soon, Amazon, Google, and other OEMs introduced smart displays and started demonstrating voice apps on smart TVs. Google insisted all Actions for Assistant at least render text on the screen.


More Tools and More Modes to Support

Amazon then introduced Alexa Presentation Language (APL) and Google launched Interactive Canvas and suddenly not only was there more work to do to “publish everywhere,” but also some new tools to learn. Multimodal means that developing for voice apps can actually be more complex because you must accommodate both a voice user interface (VUI) and a GUI. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. But, here were are.

Bixby is a bit different from its voice assistant peers because it assumes multimodal features from the start. Google Assistant does as well, but you can get away with voice and text and skip the visuals if need be. Bixby expects an all-of-the-above approach of voice, visual, touch, and more. That makes it very flexible, but also adds some work. Then you have that issue of optimizing for all of those Samsung devices. So, it’s not a surprise that so many developers at SDC 19 were more excited about Bixby Views than the other announcements. It will help them reach more devices and save time.... "