Samsung's Bixby will soon be moving from your phone to your fridge

By Lulu Chang May 15, 2017

Samsung Family Hub — Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

If you’re the proud owner of a Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8+, you have already been introduced to the joys of Bixby. But fret not, other smartphone owners. Soon, you will be able to give Samsung’s virtual assistant a home, too. That is, if you give bring a Samsung smart refrigerator into your home.

On Sunday, the Korean company announced plans to bring Bixby in its Family Hub 2.0 refrigerator, which marks the AI tool’s debut in home appliances. And if you own an older model of the Family Hub refrigerator, Samsung noted it will also enable automatic updates to bring the Bixby software onboard your existing fridge. The addition of Bixby to Samsung’s existing suite of appliances will help the company compete more directly with companies like Google and Amazon, which are leveraging their own virtual assistants handily in the smart home arena with Google Assistant and Alexa.

Ultimately, Samsung plans on including the AI assistant in all its consumer electronics, not just its smartphones. With the addition of Bixby, the Family Hub 2.0 refrigerator will let customers search for recipes, weather information, their favorite songs, and more, all using their voice. Moreover, thanks to the assistant’s deep learning capabilities, your fridge can even control the temperature in your kitchen (or heck, your whole house), and begin learning what recipes you prefer most, or recommend music to help you pass the time while you are prepping for dinner.

Already, the smart fridge connects with other Samsung appliances, including washing machines, air conditioners, and vacuum cleaners. As such, the addition of Bixby will only make your smart home ecosystem easier to control, with your fridge serving as command central.

“The digital assistant Bixby can learn itself by analyzing user’s voice commands,” a Samsung spokesperson said. So even if you have a smart fridge, Samsung promises that you have never seen anything quite like a Bixby-enabled smart home device.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…

Mobile

Operation Shush: The rise and fall of Samsung’s unloved Bixby assistant

Bixby Galaxy S21 Trending

There’s a silent campaign -- let's call it Operation Shush -- to stop you from using Bixby on your Samsung phone. The virtual assistant was once heralded as the future of control for connected Samsung devices, and the answer to Apple’s Siri and Google's Assistant. Today, just like the Galaxy Home — a Bixby-focused product that has never been released — Bixby isn’t mentioned much at all, almost as if it’s hoped we forget it ever existed.

What happened? And does Bixby deserve to be silenced?
Lofty expectations
“The possibility of what Bixby can become is endless,” Injong Rhee, Samsung’s head of research and development, wrote in the original 2017 announcement, arguably setting Bixby up for failure right from the start. We were told Bixby was “a new intelligent interface on our devices” and “fundamentally different from other voice agents or assistants in the market.”

Mobile

Samsung’s new upcycling program turns your old phone into a SmartThings device

samsung galaxy upcycling at home ces 2021 smartthings

The smartphone business isn't exactly the most eco-friendly. Companies have been working to correct that in recent years, like through programs that disassemble and reuse the metals inside of our phones, but there's still a long way to go. Samsung has announced an alternative solution to the problem, though -- the new Galaxy Upcycling at Home initiative that envisions your old Galaxy phones as smart home devices.

Galaxy Upcycling at Home works with Samsung's SmartThings smart home system and allows users to designate their old phones as a number of different things.

Mobile

Android 11 is now rolling out to some Samsung Galaxy phones, if you’re lucky

Samsung Galaxy S20 range

Samsung users are set to finally get Android 11. Samsung has finally offered some information about its update rollout -- and as long as you have a recent Galaxy device, you may be able to get it relatively soon.

The first phones to get Android 11, which includes One UI 3.0, will be the Samsung Galaxy S20 series, minus the Galaxy S20 FE. In the U.S., South Korea, and most of Europe, Galaxy S20, S20+, and S20 Ultra users should expect to get the update over the next few weeks, with some users set to get it right away. According to reports, however, it seems as though some UK Note 20 users have already gotten the update.