Samsung is making its conversational AI assistant Bixby safer for children. With a new update, Bixby is now available for children’s accounts on Samsung devices that can deliver kid-friendly content and respond to queries in an age-appropriate way.
The Samsung Bixby operations team confirmed that the feature is only available in the U.S. and South Korea right now, but intends to release Bixby for Kids in additional countries/regions. The process will be gradual and as of now, there is no exact timeline or roadmap.
Bixby Kids can be enabled via Samsung Account after creating a family group and setting up a child account. Samsung’s official announcement states that the feature is available for children under the age of 13, although this age limit may vary by country/region.
Bixby for Kids is largely the same as the version accessible to adults, but with content curated for children. For example, kids can ask Bixby questions and the conversational AI will answer in an age-appropriate way.
Bixby Kids also tells stories, plays music, and allows kids to play kid-friendly games. Looking at the Samsung Kids features running in One UI, it is expected that Bixby offers ad-free mobile games for kids that do not track children’s activities and prevent unnecessary game purchase transactions. Samsung’s announcement also mentions that the recent Bixby update brings feature improvements and bug fixes.
Recent reports suggest that Samsung may be considering bringing advanced language modeling capabilities to its artificial intelligence. Samsung is looking at tools such as ChatGPT as an example of the next step in its conversational AI research and how these technologies can improve the user experience. Samsung has an AI R&D division and is willing to work with technology companies in the AI space to enable future advancements.
