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Samsung hides Siri diss in Bixby rap

Samsung hides Siri diss in Bixby rap

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An answer to the question nobody asked: does your digital assistant have bars?

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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Samsung’s new digital assistant Bixby is finally starting to roll out to Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus users in South Korea, and, as it does, we’re discovering that the AI-powered bot has some hitherto-unknown skills. Like rapping. And beatboxing. And dissing Siri.

All users need to do is ask the digital assistant “please rap” or “please beatbox” in Korean, and Bixby will happily oblige. As the video below shows, the assistant has a number of different verses on tap, each of which sounds, well, like a robot trying to rap.

The content is pretty innocuous, but in one verse Samsung does sneak in a half-hearted diss against its main competitor, Apple. If you look at the letters at the beginning of each line in the second rap it spells out the phrase “I am better than Siri.” This is a little rich considering that Bixby isn’t even available outside of South Korea, and that the assistant won’t reach its full potential without help from the team that created Siri.

The rest of the rap isn’t so bold, as our translation below shows:

Something that doesn’t change with time
Bixby on the rhythm
Seeing is not everything / You’ll know when I speak
Please tell me one more time Bixby
I’ll rap so sing me a song
Take it deep into your heart Bixby
Doesn’t matter if you can’t spell
Please tell me one more time Bixby

If you read the first letter of each line in this rap, it spells out “I am better than Siri.”
If you read the first letter of each line in this rap, it spells out “I am better than Siri.”
Image: Imgur / Reddit

We don’t know if Bixby will be able to rap in English, but then again, we don’t even know when the assistant will be available in the US. The bigger question now, is will the tech world’s other AI assistants — Alexa, Siri, and Google Now — fire back in this war of words? (Siri can already rap a little, mind; reciting garbled lyrics from “Rapper’s Delight,” for example.) Please join us in a quick prayer that the answer to this is a firm, unequivocal “no.”

At least Bixby’s beatboxing is more respectable.