Hello. Yes, it’s me. Juan Carlos F. Galindo. Or rather my animated emoji or avatar, as represented by the Samsung Galaxy S9 + that I have been testing in the last two weeks. Below you can read my impressions about the intelligent solutions it integrates, including biometric authentication or those that take advantage of the camera to include augmented reality and create emojis or translate texts using the camera with the Bixby Vision application.
All of them make the Samsung Galaxy S9 + the most advanced terminal on the market at the moment, rather as of March 16, which is when it begins to be marketed. For how long will it be the most advanced, or one of the most innovative? It will depend on Apple, Huawei or LG, among others.
I recognize that I have put you in some difficulty, not to say that I set you some trap. But I tell you. The first day I set up facial recognition in somewhat poor lighting conditions. In the hotel room, in Barcelona, with little light, and without shaving that day. When I went out to dinner, to a restaurant in the Plaza de España, and also in low light, the device was unable to recognize my face. And there I left it. The next morning I shaved, and with more light in the hotel restaurant, I tried to turn on the S9 + ‘by the face’, and neither.
So I decided to switch and combine facial recognition and iris recognition, which the Samsung Galaxy S9 + also has. And neither. There was no way the terminal would recognize me, not with glasses, not without glasses. The fingerprint, which is also integrated into the device, worked perfectly when I turned to this option that Samsung has more optimized.
From here, I decided to stop putting hatches on the S9 + and configured facial recognition again, only, in good lighting conditions and the two profiles of the face, the mustache and the beard, well shaved. And since then we have understood each other, although when the light conditions are reduced, I have to insert the pin so that the device becomes operational.
I think Samsung should adjust the biometric authentication a bit more, especially in adverse light conditions, because it is not comfortable to be reconfiguring and entering the pin for the equipment to work. Perhaps, as some experts at Ovum, Forrester or Mckinsey say, you have to switch to voice recognition for biometric authentication to be foolproof. Or that the software and deep learning that uses the biometric facial recognition solution, the sensors and the camera are better understood.
The AR Emojis have seemed to me ‘Very Interesting’, especially for that profile of users who continuously send and share images and videos through their Social Networks. However, the application must evolve in functionalities and facial recognition with a better definition of the face so that it can become, as the experts say, ‘killer application’.
To configure the animated emojis, the deep learning that integrates the S9 + analyzed my face in 2D, mapping around 100 facial features, to obtain a 3D image with them. Although the idea is interesting, the definition of the image, I reiterate, should improve a lot. For this, deep learning would have to analyze many thousands of facial points, instead of just 100. Surely with future developments and updates of software and the artificial intelligence component in the S9 and S9 + this solution improves significantly.
About Bixby, as an intelligent voice assistant, I will say little. I believe that until the application works in Spanish, users in Spain will not use it naturally and on a daily basis. Nor do they use too much those that are already in other mobile devices, because they are not tuned for the language of Cervantes. As Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, CEO and founder of Sher.pa says, ‘until digital assistants are not what they really should be, to help people in daily life, they will not be really useful.’ With Xabier we have talked a little about the present and future of voice assistants, and in the near future you will see the result of this talk in which we talk about this type of smart assistants on smartphones, home and connected vehicle.
The augmented reality app Bixby Vision, on the other hand, strikes me as a genius. How comfortable it would be to arrive in Beijing, for example, open the camera of the Samsung Galaxy S9 + and Bixby Vision and put it in front of any text with Chinese characters and be able to understand it. At the moment I have had the opportunity to try it this past week in London to translate a restaurant menu into Spanish, and I admit that the application has hooked me. I will also have to try it in the next few days in Paris, for example, that French is not so fluent in it. The Bixby Vision system automatically recognizes and detects, according to Samsung, up to 33 languages, and it also works by detecting objects and recommending where to buy them.
Regarding the camera, and its fantastic functionalities that take advantage of artificial intelligence software and deep learning, I am going to contribute little to the fantastic articles that other colleagues and experts in photography have already published. I can only say that, thanks to the AI capabilities of the camera, and the Exynos 9810 processor, I look like a professional photographer, that is when I let the automatic and the neural chip work on its own and take videos in super slow motion or Super Slow Mo, or when I take snapshots with Live Focus. I share some of these images so you can see what a fantastic photographer I am with the automatic mode and the Samsung S9 +.
