[Courtesy of Samsung]
Samsung was given an upper hand in South Korea's mobile banking industry Friday as users of its latest smartphones, Galaxy S8 and S8+, can activate related services just by talking to the artificial intelligence voice assistant "Bixby".
Samsung has updated Bixby to support voice commands in mobile banking. The tech giant said in a statement Friday that S8 users can order the AI voice assistant with simple commands such as "Please show my account balance".
The mobile banking service linked with Bixby is available via apps provided by four banks -- Shinhan, Woori, KEB and Hana. All partner banks provide transaction and account balance checking services. For mobile voice banking, users can authenticate themselves with an iris scanner, a fingerprint scanner or other means provided by each bank.
Samsung gained a headlong start with its digital wallet service, Samsung Pay, in 2015. With Bixby, Samsung effectively shoved away its domestic rival LG which launched LG PAY, a mobile payment system, this week. LG PAY and Samsung Pay use smartphones to mimic magnetic stripes of plastic cards, enabling them to be used at any cash registers with magnetic card readers.
Park Sae-jin = swatchsjp@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
