Whether you use Samsung’s Bixby personal assistant or not, the company has more upgrades for the assistant coming your way. Samsung is today launching a new Bixby store called the Bixby Marketplace that’s supposed to “enhance” the Bixby experience.

The new store is launching in the United States and Korea first, and it’s accessible with a left-swipe on the main Bixby page.

Bixby Marketplace is the home for these new tools called “capsules”. Capsules are basically like Alexa Skills, but for Bixby. They add better third-party integration for many services, including apps like Spotify, Yelp, and Google Maps. “The Bixby Marketplace’s official launch lays the foundation for an open ecosystem of useful services that developers will continuously enrich, and users will be able to make their mobile experience more personal and intuitive,” Samsung says.

These new capsules are categorized and you can find a variety of different capsules for a certain task. Bixby even lets you set a preferred capsule for certain types of requests. So for example, you can set a preferred ride-share capsule for your “get me a ride” requests.

Bixby capsules are pretty cool, but they aren’t anything we haven’t seen before. It’s a step in the right direction for making Bixby a better personal assistant, but whether that will actually make people use Bixby instead of Google Assistant or Alexa is very doubtful. Samsung says the company will continue updating the Bixby platform and introduce “exciting” updates to the Bixby Marketplace at the Samsung Developer Conference in October.

Tagged with Bixby, Bixby Marketplace