Thanks to the new Custom Voice function and artificial intelligence, Bixby, Samsung’s voice assistant, will be able to read text messages by cloning the voice of its owner. An original option that may surprise more than one!
It is common to not be able to answer a phone call, especially when you are busy or already online. In this kind of situation, the caller generally switches to the answering machine of the called party where he can leave a voice message. For years, on both Android and iOS, it has also been possible to react directly to an incoming call with a small text message, most often ready to use, of the type “I’ll call you back in a few minutes”. But Samsung intends to go even further to offer more possibilities to users of its smartphones, when they are unable to respond, by providing its intelligent assistant Bixby with a particularly original new function.
As the Korean manufacturer announced on February 22, 2023 in a blog post, thanks to the function called Bixby Text Call, the assistant will be able to read “aloud” text messages typed directly by the user when he cannot answer, using artificial intelligence. Already available for some time in Korean, this AI-assisted response mode is now also available in English, which opens up a much larger panel of potential users around the world.
Even better, using the brand new Bixby Custom Voice option, everyone will be able to record their own voice for Bixby to mimic in the responses they read! Here again, artificial intelligence will be in charge. The strongest thing is that she will be able to take back the intonation of the original voice, to avoid the artificial side of robotic systems. Be careful though: it is not a question of starting a conversation with a correspondent, as ChatGPT can do, but, more modestly, of reading pre-recorded sentences, from texts. But that will be enough to give the illusion of a real interlocutor.
For now, this little innovation is reserved for Korean users of Samsung’s latest high-end smartphones, the famous S23, S23+ and S23 Ultra. But who knows, it may be available on other models, or even imitated by other manufacturers…