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.

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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.

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