The news is part of Samsung’s “Bixby 2.0” update, announced today at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco. The revamped Bixby is smarter, has better voice recognition capabilities, and has improved personalization features.
It’s also the first time Samsung has started to bring its much-hyped assistant to devices other than its smartphones — a significant move for the company, whose assistant lags behind Amazon and Google.
Adding Bixby to appliances, though, stands to eventually give Samsung a leg up over Amazon and Google, which have already been slowly integrating with home appliances. But given that Samsung already sells a whole lot of its own washers, dryers, TVs, and fridges, the company could easily make up a lot of lost ground fairly quickly — at least in theory.
The Bixby-enabled TVs will ship next year in the U.S. and Korea. It’s not clear when Bixby will be ready for the Family Hub fridges and other appliances.
