This February, we announced the launch of On-Device Bixby: a new, more secure and more efficient way to interact with Bixby Mobile end-to-end directly on the phone without transferring any data online. Now, after months of development, we proudly present Bixby Text Call (BTC), a new On-Device Bixby’s feature for four European languages developed by Samsung R&D Institute Poland’s Voice Intelligence Research Team in cooperation with European MQA Bixby Testing. The whole process was possible thanks to the guidance and advice provided by MX's AI R&D Group based in Suwon.

Bixby Text Call transforms voice calls into written text, enabling its users to answer incoming calls without speaking. When a BTC user receives a phone call, Bixby picks it up on their behalf and asks the person on the other end about the purpose of the call. As the caller responds, Bixby transcribes their words in real time, and the conversation is displayed on the screen in a chat-like mode. The BTC user can then start typing with the keyboard or select a quick response at the bottom of the screen, and Bixby will read the message back to the caller.
This feature comes in handy in a variety of scenarios, such as commuting or in business meetings. It also allows the user to make an informed decision about whether or not to pick up the phone when they suspect a spam call.

Previously, Bixby Text Call had been available exclusively for Korean and English, but it has now become available also in French, German, Italian and Spanish. All the applications were launched this summer in two batches, with the German one first on the 29th of June and the remaining languages on the 7th of August. Developing BTC has been a challenge, as the scope of the phone calls is really broad – people talk about everything on the phone! Our models were trained with a sizable amount of data, including but not limited to real-life phone conversations on topics such as banking, insurance or telecommunications.

We also acknowledged the need to recognize diverse modalities, such as synthetic speech or colloquial language. It all made the development a rewarding journey, which will be further continued when we teach Bixby to cover new use cases. Bixby Text Call is an innovative solution and, at the moment, the only point of comparison on the market is Google’s Screen Call available on the Pixel line of devices. Nevertheless, there is an important difference between the two. Screen Call is intended mostly as a filter for robocalls and spam calls to avoid unwanted conversations. In contrast, Bixby Text Call has been designed to assist its users in situations where it might not be suitable to talk, rather than being mostly spam-oriented. This makes it a more versatile feature.

At the same time, both applications aim at combining texting and phone calls through text to speech transcription for incoming calls. This made Screen Call a natural benchmark for Samsung’s team. Over the course of development, we compared the performance of our product to the one achieved by Google’s devices and we are pleased to communicate that BTC outperformed Google's Screen Call feature in our QA tests.

How to activate and use

To try out Bixby Text Call, you need a Galaxy device with One UI 5.1 or higher installed. Follow the steps below to activate this feature:

• Open the Phone app.

• Tap the three-dot menu and select Settings.

• Find Bixby Text Call on the list, select it and toggle ON.

• Tap Language and Voice, select your language and download the language pack.

• Additionally, you can customize quick responses available during the call through the Quick Responses menu.

Once Bixby Text Call is activated, a BTC icon will appear next to the traditional Accept and Decline icons when you receive an incoming call. Tapping it sends the call straight to the BTC mode. However, it is possible to switch to a traditional voice call at any time.
We invite you to give BTC a try and let Bixby handle your calls next time you are at a concert or when you suspect yet another attempt at selling you something you did not ask for. See how Bixby learned to assist you in this completely new way!