Samsung: Bixby voice assistant can imitate voice

Samsung has presented an innovation of its voice assistant Bixby. The program can imitate the user’s voice thanks to artificial intelligence. So far, the function is only available in South Korea on the Galaxy S23 – and only in Korean.

Practical function for Bixby?

The function, which is supposed to bring Samsung’s so far little-noticed voice assistant back into the limelight, is advertised as a practical everyday feature. It is to be used when users cannot or do not want to speak, but have to make phone calls. In this case, they can type in sentences that are then read out by the voice assistant using their voice. Beforehand, a process must be run through in which the AI learns to imitate the respective voice.

What sounds very practical, however, brings problems with it. For example, there is a high risk of misuse when such an individual identifier is imitated. This does not refer to Bixby specifically, but to the imitation of voices in general; Samsung, however, only focuses on positive aspects with its promotion of the new Bixby function. Up to now, voices imitated by artificial intelligence have primarily been used for deepfakes. Particularly prominent here were fake Klitschko phone calls with political figures in the West. The further spread of such programs could also make such phenomena much more frequent. Samsung is nevertheless already planning to expand the function, which will soon be used in other apps as well.

Call automation progresses

With the new feature of Bixby, the automation of calls could make a significant leap. Efforts to this end have been underway for some time. On Pixel devices from Google, it has already been possible for some time to have calls answered by the voice assistant system. Here, too, entered text is output via AI voice. However, this is a generic voice. Google also introduced a program called Duplex in 2018 that can automatically make appointments with companies. Here, too, a generic voice is used.