season 2, episode 8 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan. a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here. host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guests aleksander tyszka, hyun kim, dan appelquist, aaron swift, roger kibbe, sooyeon kim, eric cloninger samsung developer conference after taking a year off due to the pandemic, we recently held our annual developer conference, sdc21. this year’s conference was a virtual conference, with insightful highlight sessions and in-depth tech talks. in this episode, i sit down with several samsung insiders, to recap the many highlights from this year’s show. we'll chat about one ui 4, the samsung incubation program, smartthings, bixby, our partnership with google and the new watch ecosystem, samsung internet and our new podcast platform. listen download this episode topics covered samsung incubation program one ui 4 samsung internet smartthings bixby developers watch ecosystem samsung podcast platform transcript note: transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team. inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript. tony morelan 00:01 hey, i'm tony morelan, and this is pow!, the samsung developers podcasts, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools. welcome to season two, episode eight. after taking a year off due to the pandemic, we recently held our annual developer conference sdc21. this year's conference was a virtual conference with insightful highlight sessions in in depth tech talks. in this episode, i sit down with several samsung insiders to recap some of the great moments from this year's show. we'll chat about one ui 4, the samsung incubation program, smartthings, the new watch ecosystem, samsung internet and a new podcast platform. enjoy. so at sdc21, one of the most interesting talk sessions that i watched was the kafir innovator session where they talked about the samsung incubation program. and joining me on the podcast is someone who works closely with that incubation program, alec tyszka, who's a manager technology strategy and partnerships at samsung. yeah, welcome to the podcast. hey, tony, how are you doing? well, let's start with what is the samsung incubation program? aleksander tyszka 01:20 sure. so samsung innovation program is an incubation program that we've launched already in europe a few years back, and that we've expanded this year in the us the program itself has two main goals is one we want our business unit. so you know, different groups at samsung that work on digital appliances, tvs, smartphones, wearables, we want to give them a way to do very sort of rapid prototyping to quickly develop new products and services. but very highly innovative ones things that weren't organically be created. if we just did our everyday work. the other one is to also be able to work with the labs that samsung have done work on, though, on long term projects, we want to have sort of all the brands that that leverage all the brands we have at samsung to create these, these this long-term vision that we have about what are the services that people are going to use? what are the products that people are going to need, and try to find a way to bring these products and services to life? tony morelan 02:22 yeah, so i saw, you know, in that session where they, you know, talked about that, that need to innovate in some of those technologies that came out of those partnerships, where you know, like the health sensors with wearables, z fold, things like that, it's pretty interesting to think that those technologies came out of those partnership collaborations. aleksander tyszka 02:41 yeah, i think when we start working with cutting edge technology, and you mentioned the z fold, especially some technologies i've been that have been developed internally at samsung, for flexible and foldable screens does are quite unique, right? there's only a handful of company that that make them in the world. and then if you talk of, of the scale, by which we work with these, we don't make five foldable phones, right, we make 10s of millions. so sure what when you work at this scale, with those sort of cutting-edge bleeding edge technology, it just takes a lot, a lot of efforts to bring them to life. and samsung alone can't really do it, we need to find partners, and we need to work with them. and those are typically startups and all that all sort of the people that work around startups, incubators, accelerators, venture capitalist industry experts, in we need to find the solutions to improve the product and bring these products to life. tony morelan 03:34 yeah, and i'm sure that, you know, having that collaboration with those, those innovators really help you like think ahead, thinking to the future, you know, where do you need to go? where do you need to focus your energy? so it's great that there is this program to allow samsung to work with these, these innovators. so tell me what are some of the details of the of the program. aleksander tyszka 03:54 so the program itself is a six-month long program, we get we'll provide some funding stun company, anywhere from 20 to 100k, depending on what the companies do, if it's hardware, a software, there's no string attached with this funding, we don't take any equity and like some of the big household names like y combinator is 500 startups. and then we provide a lot of mentoring, mostly technical mentoring from our engineers and our labs. sure. and the idea is just to help them build a prototype help them showcase a demo to our executive immediately after the program after six months, two years, two outcomes we're really looking for and then we'll qualify as successful outcomes is either investment or commercialization. meaning we'll work with the companies will leverage our solution to build a product. tony morelan 04:41 ah, that's great. so in the call for innovator session, what was the key highlight the key takeaway from that session? aleksander tyszka 04:47 sure. the key highlight for us is really that we need partners. we want to be part of the ecosystem and we want to give back that ecosystem. you know, startups are a major part of that ecosystem. they're very forward looking we want to, we want to leverage their ideas, and we want to contribute positively to them want to help them. and we want to be able to connect with the entire ecosystem behind the startups, the universities, the vcs, incubators, we want to work with all these people. that's the main takeaway is samsung wants to remain, you know, very innovative, but we want to do it tony morelan 05:22 with partners. you know, my takeaway from that session was hearing that success story fibricheck, where they created that on device, ecg sensing, that would help detect irregular and rapid heart rate using ai in our in our galaxy watch. and seeing that, you know, it wasn't just that we provided funding, but it was that collaboration where you know, where we helped build the medical grade application, we, you know, helped with the regulatory approval, but then also learning that that we helped with, you know, define what their business model was in their in their go to market strategy that was really neat to see that that success story that was shared. aleksander tyszka 06:02 yeah, i think for especially when companies in the health space, right, we did that, that's a pretty fragmented space, right? there's a lot of device manufacturers in many different countries that have their own sort of regulatory constraints. by working with these types of companies, we provide a very sort of great way, a great go to market strategy for them, it's sort of built in, it's like, here's our wearables, we sell, you know, 10s of millions of them every year. and they're very standard, they're easy to integrate, and well will support older go to market, going through retail stores, and those sort of things. i mean, it makes it easier for the company right to quickly grow their company. and for help, specifically, that fear check is such a great example of the sort of things we're trying to achieve, right. and there's a ton more we can do at that space, people are talking about noninvasive, continuous glucose monitoring, maybe hydration as well in the future, and we want to find a company building these features and try to work with them. tony morelan 07:01 yeah, and, you know, just at large, we've got this enormous ecosystem, you know, with our devices, you know, with galaxy store smartthings, bixby and there's just so many areas that we can be involved with. aleksander tyszka 07:11 yeah, the ecosystem we provide is it's huge. and it's sometimes it's hard for us to prioritize which companies we want to bring in into that ecosystem, right. but going through a program like samsung's incubation program, were able to quickly filter for the best partners and focus our efforts, our efforts, sorry, on the ones that were most contribute to that ecosystem. tony morelan 07:32 so it was great to hear you know, all about the samsung incubation program, what is the best way for people to connect with your team? aleksander tyszka 07:41 so we will have a website up and running pretty soon until then you can email us at info.jump@samsung.com. tony morelan 07:49 so there were a lot of great sessions at sdc21. what were some of the favorite sessions that you saw that developers should check out? aleksander tyszka 07:56 yeah, i think the first one i have in mind is the one on the foldable device, i have a full device myself, i really, really like it, i get a lot of comment when people see it. and then when they know and looking at stuff with it, there's basically different modes, right? you can you can use the front screen and use it like a regular device. but the second you fold it, like a 45-degree angle, you want the app to act differently with the application. so a good example of that is what if it became sort of like a gameboy where you have your screen on one on one ends? and bottom part of your controllers? yeah. and there's a lot more use case like that. what about video conferencing tool where you can see other people in the top screen in the bottom screen is a whiteboard where people can collaborate. so i think there's a lot of use cases that can develop. and we haven't even begun sort of scratching the surface of what can be devops. so i look forward to see more developers. think about that. start developing around that and see what they can come up with. tony morelan 08:49 excellent. that's great. hey, alec, i really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. it was it was wonderful to learn much more about what you guys are doing at the samsung incubation program. aleksander tyszka 08:58 oh, thank you very much for having me. tony was a pleasure. excellent. thanks. tony morelan 09:01 so one ui four was one of the biggest announcements we made at sdc. and i'm excited to have on the podcast, head of the core ux group for samsung mobile, he and kim. hyun kim 09:12 hi, i'm leon kim, and for inviting me. and it's very exciting to be joining podcast. tony morelan 09:19 so when you why is the user interface installed on samsung devices and was originally released back in 2019. for people who are listening to the podcast that might not be familiar with the details of one ui? can you give us a brief overview? hyun kim 09:32 oh, sure. one ui means entire software experience that galaxy devices are delivering to our users, meaning it actually includes productivity experience and watching videos and privacy experience, onboarding experience and all different services and apps and all that our customer can enjoy from galaxy devices. tony morelan 09:56 you gave a highlight session at sdc on the soon to be released one ui four that was really insightful. can you share some of the key takeaways from that session? hyun kim 10:06 sure. ever since we launched the one ui, we've been emphasized our users to be able to focus on what matters at each moment. so focus is one of the highlighted experience that we want to enhance, as well. and when you're a 4.0. on top of it, we also want to deliver the comfort experience as well. especially these days, pandemic gives our users screen for t, meaning the screen time is increasing. and the number of apps that people are juggling, and for period of time that they are looking at the screen is increasing. and then people are having eye fatigue. and we actually really need to deliver more comfortable experience for their eyes and for their peace of mind. so we took care of all those aspects when we design on ui four. so we took out visual lewis's as much as possible, we took out the number of colors, we took out the number of different font sizes, minimize the visual noises, so that user can focus on and consume the important content. and third test that they think it matters at the moment very comfortably. also, we allow extra diem feature, when user see the screen went dark, we want their eyes to be more comfortable. so we collaborate with google make the screen even darker than the darkest level right now. and we believe that would be more comfortable with those new features and new design. tony morelan 11:56 yeah, no, that's great. and i loved hearing about the natural interactions, these intuitive interactions that are being developed into one uio 4 talk about that. hyun kim 12:05 recently, people are juggling more number of apps, and they are facing the more number of features. and they're consuming more amount of content, meaning we need to provide very simple ui, ui needs to be higher level of intuitiveness. so we wanted to put more gesture on the content itself. so that user can feel they manipulate and control content itself without looking at ui component. so then, non-visual component should help users to feel the reaction when user touch the screen. so we put motions, visuals and physical feedback. harmonize together, so that when user touch the content and move the content and drag and drop the content, we want them to feel they are moving the real physical object to one place to another. tony morelan 13:08 yeah, and those vibrations, those are called haptics, correct haptics, hyun kim 13:11 right? every version of you on ui, we enhance the haptics and this year, the direction of enhancement of haptic feedback is not only just adding a right bit back in the right place, but also, we add the haptic feedback with motion and visuals together to create a feeling of natural interaction in the physical world. tony morelan 13:35 yeah, so i know that that that combination of sound animation and haptics will definitely provide for some very, very real-life device interactions. talk a bit about privacy, because i know that privacy was mentioned in your session, what are some of the improvements related around privacy? hyun kim 13:53 basically, what we believe is transparency is very important. so providing peace of mind, for our customer, about the privacy, the basically transparency is really important. the first one is we're showing all the apps list that are using user's personal data. so the user can see which apps are using which data and then user can easily access the individual apps permission, turning on and off. also, on offered right corner of the device. the screen is showing when camera or mic is on then icon is displayed, so that user can clearly recognize okay, camera is on mic is on. and if it's not fair, then you can feel safe. okay, nobody's listening or watching. tony morelan 14:47 yeah, that's, that's great. so coming from one ui three, what are some of the biggest improvements that we're now going to see in one ui for hyun kim 14:55 improvement wise as a new experience is self-expression, the more we research customers, the more we're sure that they're expressing themselves in many different ways and have any fun ways. and they want to express their emotions and thoughts, and creativities and their identities and themselves, as they are in many different places in our galaxy one ui for we want them to enjoy expressing themselves. for instance, we're launching a new tool for them to create a fun emoji pair animation for them to create their own content to express their emotions. but sometimes one emoji isn't just enough for them to express their rich emotions. people can choose two different images to put together and put animation to bring the combo to life. and then there are chosen to emoji can be animated and delivered to their friends and family via messenger. and it'll be very fun content, like exploding head. yeah, you can create your own content. there are many, many fun, any major that we're providing. also, there are presets. so we believe people will enjoy this in samsung keyboard when they communicate each other. and they will express their emotion in a very fun way. also, we enhance photo editor a lot so that people can express their thoughts and creativity when they picture and edit it and share. every year we've been enhancing photo editor video earlier about this year, we redesigned editors so that user can see this very seamless and easy, simple, intuitive editor ux. tony morelan 16:54 and i loved when you spoke about extracting wallpaper colors to be used throughout the ui experience. hyun kim 17:00 oh, yeah, that's, that's another very fun feature, except for expression isn't just about what you send out. self-expression is about your styles, you can style your phone, you can extract the color from your wallpaper, you also can pick your wallpaper from your gallery. so you can choose whatever your favorite pictures from your gallery and put your wallpaper. and then we're providing four different color palette that can apply to your one ui. and you can choose one of the four options, then your ui color will be changed and color schemes will be different or depending on what you're choosing. and this is a little different than other like theming services because when your eyes original usability and identity are still there. but the color keeping the readability usability, the only the color is going to be changing. yeah. and you can still enjoy the benefit of one ui with only the color that you choose from the wallpaper. tony morelan 18:12 yeah, in you get that single experience across all platforms, meaning you know all of your devices, whether it's your phone, your tablet, your watch galaxy book, tell me a little bit more about that cross-platform experience, hyun kim 18:24 we have been putting effort, the device eco system experience. this year, we launched the wherewith for when you watch and more than ever, we put the best seamless experience between galaxy book galaxy watch, and flip and folder and phone and tablet. and we also launched enhanced version of quick share. the experience for sending receiving files between devices, click share allows users to send and receive any type of files to your friends who has galaxy and to your devices and receive as well quickly if the devices are around you. tony morelan 19:14 yeah, that's great. so tell me when will when ui for be available on different devices. hyun kim 19:21 we're really excited to be releasing one ui four update before the end of the year. tony morelan 19:26 and to upgrade is it as simple as going into your menu settings, your software, update menu settings and just selecting the upgrade? hyun kim 19:35 yeah, you can update it go to settings and software update. tony morelan 19:39 excellent. so for developers that want to learn more about when ui for what is the best way, hyun kim 19:45 you can go to websites like www dot developer at samsung.com/one-ui tony morelan 19:56 what other sessions at sdc would you suggest that developers checkout? hyun kim 19:59 sure, there are many, many exciting helpful sessions. but one other person that i want to recommend is one of the highlights session for the title was what's new in foldable. and they're talking about multitasking capabilities and flex mode to help developers optimize their own apps and optimizing web pages supporting flex mode by using the web share device posture api. tony morelan 20:25 yeah, yeah. and there was also there was a tech talk session that i liked, called one ui designing a more intuitive, approachable experience that was by jung woo, you that was another great, great session. hyun kim 20:36 yeah, he's actually a member in my group. and he has been putting a huge amount of effort to prepare that session. and i know the content is very fun and exciting. tony morelan 20:48 well, thanks for joining me on the podcast. again. it was wonderful to chat with you and about the upcoming release of one ui for sure. thank hyun kim 20:55 you. thanks. thanks for having me here. tony morelan 20:58 all right. next on the podcast is someone very familiar with the show who i've had on the podcast several times. now, dan, apple quest from samsung internet. dan appelquist 21:06 hi, tony. it's great to be back on the podcast. tony morelan 21:10 excellent. so dan is the director of developer advocacy for samsung internet. we did an episode last year and actually did another episode earlier this year. so be sure to go check out those to learn a ton about samsung internet, and what dan's team's doing. but for those that might not be familiar with samsung internet, can you tell us what is samsung internet? dan appelquist 21:28 sure. i'm leading the developer advocacy group of samsung internet, our group is based in in the uk, actually. and we're kind of an international team. what is samsung internet? samsung internet is samsung's mobile browser for android phones. it's also available for any android phone, but it is shipped on samsung phones. it's the purple planet. you know, if you're if you're familiar with your normal samsung icon, set your one ui concept. that's us. that's the purple planet. we also just launched a version for galaxy watch, which is very cool. that's hot off the press news right now. so if you've got a one of the latest galaxy watches, you can also download samsung internet for galaxy watch. it's based on chromium, the chromium project, which is the same open source project that google chrome is based off of, a lot of other browsers are based on chromium. however, samsung is also a major contributor into the chromium project into the chromium open source projects. so we're not just taking the chromium browser and slapping our own ui on it that we're actually contributing in to chromium. and we do an awful lot to build our own features and technologies into samsung internet. so in, in particular, we focus on privacy. so we protect your privacy with features like safe browsing, our own in house smart anti tracking technology, and the ability to install third party blockers, ad blockers, tracking blockers, that kind of thing. so those are the kinds of things that we're doing to kind of protect people as they use the web. and that's an that's such a key important role that browsers have. we're also a great platform first progressive web apps. if you have attended any of our previous sessions at previous sdcs. you'll know that we're big fans of progressive web apps just briefly, a progressive web app is a web application that can be installed onto your device and looks to the user as if it is a native application. but it's actually running inside the browser. so good example is twitter has a progressive web app pwa. many other web sites and web properties have progressive web app versions of their other applications. and in fact, we just participated in a separate conference, which just ran recently in collaboration with microsoft and google, and that had a complete focus on pwa. s. and if you're interested in that, it's all streamable from pwa summit.org. tony morelan 24:06 awesome. so there were some great sessions at sec related to samsung at both when it came to foldables. and with extensions, can you tell me what were some of the highlights for you? sure. dan appelquist 24:16 so we're really, really excited to be able to speak at sdc this year about our work with foldables. so as far as foldables go, the exciting news that we're able to talk about is that we're launching an experimental api called the device posture api. it's being developed in the world wide web consortium in the w three c as a proposed web standard with intel and microsoft as partners. this api is launched behind a flag right now, tony morelan 24:47 what does that mean dan appelquist 24:48 behind a flag? it means you have to you have to activate it, in order to make it work. it's not going to work out of the box and that's because it is experimental. the reason it's like that is because we want people to experiment with this api. sure, it may change, right. and usually when api's are in this kind of place where are in a phase of their development where they might change their launched behind a flag, so that developers get a chance to play with it, play with it feedback into the process. and by the way, laura, for my team who gave the talk on device posture api at sdc is also the person participating in the standards committee, the w three c devices and sensors working group and contributing that into that work. all of that is happening on github. so there's absolutely an opportunity for developers to get engaged. and all of that information is in is in laura's talk as well. tony morelan 25:45 oh, yeah, that's great. yeah, i had laura on the podcast earlier this year that she would she was an excellent guest. dan appelquist 25:50 she's, she's great. she's really good. we've also been working with some partners to get their feedback and to get some early implementations out there so that we can get some experience with this. in particular, we're working with youtube. and we're working with a company called whereby, which is a video conferencing company based out of norway. okay. so these are good examples of where you might want to change the ui of your web application when the user folds the device. and that's basically the key element here that we're talking about. and that's also why when we're talking about this new api, we're talking about it in the context of responsive design. yeah, and that was a lot of the focus of laura's talk as well. responsive design, meaning that the application itself responds to changes in the screen size in the orientation, that kind of thing. so you are responding. and being i'm adapting the ui to the to the user's needs. tony morelan 26:52 yeah. and i love the interactive code lab, the laura had been involved with there. dan appelquist 26:58 that's right. and, and that, again, can allow you to kind of sink your teeth into this api, and, you know, with code examples, and, and real tutorial about how to get up and running with this. so yeah, so again, very excited to be able to do this in the virtual sdc. environment. tony morelan 27:20 yeah. excellent. so next, let's talk about the extensions, the session that that was that was given, right. tell me about that. so dan appelquist 27:27 yeah, my colleague cyclon gave a talk on the current state of our extensions api. so we launched a third-party extensions api this year. and we opened that up to a wider developer community. by the way, we're on one of very few mobile browsers that actually allow third party extensions. and we also have within the browser itself, you can go to the extensions menu, and you can find a list of the of the kinds of approved extensions that we have excellent. but those are also they're downloadable from the galaxy store. but once installed, they become part of the browser, right? so the extensions add new features to the browser. right. so just to highlight two of the extensions that are currently available for installation, we have the translator extension, which allows you to translate web pages from one language to another that's actually developed in house really, yeah, very, very cool, very cool stuff. and we recently launched an extension from the web monetization company coil. that is, that's a technology that can make anonymous micro transactions micro payments to websites that you browse from a cryptocurrency wallet. and this is, this is a kind of approach that is seen by some people as a replacement for pervasive tracking networks that currently power advertising on the web. one way of moving beyond that is to pay websites directly for the time that you spend on them. so this is a really interesting idea. we've been tracking this for a while and talking to people at coyle, who are also participants in w three, c, and a lot of the other kind of developer activities that were that we're involved in as well. so we're very excited to be able to launch this extension. it's their extension, but it's launched in the in the samsung browser, and you can install it and then you can start kind of paying websites through coil for the time that you spend on them. it only supports websites that that are subscribed to the coil system, right. so it's exactly yeah, it's early days on it, but it's something that's very exciting. tony morelan 29:34 yeah, yeah. interesting concept, sort of like the pay as you go. yeah, format. dan appelquist 29:38 yeah. yeah. you know, i don't work for coyle, right. but one of the things i think is interesting about it is that those transactions are anonymous. so it's very privacy preserving, and it fits together with our philosophy of trying to enhance and protect user privacy. tony morelan 29:53 yeah, no, i know. privacy is a big thing for you guys over samsung internet. yeah, definitely. so are there any other sessions at sdc21, that developers should be sure to check out. dan appelquist 30:03 well, i would suggest checking out the session called what's new and foldables. first of all, which is a kind of highlight session, give it gives a high-level overview and gives a lot of really good context about flex mode, what flex mode is, or what we're referring to as flex mode, which is, again, adapting the user experience of any application to the conditions of the folding device and how that's so important from a user experience standpoint. and my colleague dongbu actually gives a brief intro in that session to the device postures api, which leads into laura's longer, more detailed talk. got it, and he gives a demo a little demo of how that works as well, which is, which is very cool. tony morelan 30:49 yeah, i love learning about all the multitasking capabilities with foldables. that was that was great to hear. yeah. so if developers want to learn more about samsung internet, what is the best way? dan appelquist 31:00 well, you can visit our page on developer.samsung.com/internet. that's got links to our blog, and we blog on medium as well. but really, if you go to developer.samsung.com/internet you can find links there to all the places on the web where, we're present. you can also follow us at samsung internet on twitter. excellent, where you can always find out what we're doing. and you know, we try to keep that up to date with news about samsung internet, but also just the developer activities that we're participating in the standards activities that we're participating in. our team manages that twitter handle directly. so it's a direct line to our team and our dms are open. so if you do have questions about samsung internet, you can feel free to dm us. they're tony morelan 31:50 awesome. awesome. hey, dan, thanks very much for being on the podcast and giving us an insight into the highlights with samsung internet and sdc21. dan appelquist 31:59 thank you, tony. it's always a pleasure. awesome. thanks, tony morelan 32:01 dan. there were some great tech talks at sdc related to smart things and lots of great new innovations for shared. i'm excited to have aaron swift on the podcast director of customer and partner strategy at smart thanks. hey, aaron. aaron swift 32:16 hey, tony, how are you doing? tony morelan 32:18 doing just fine, lots of tech talks and even a highlight session for smart things. so let's start with the session smart things find from lost to found. what were some of the key points with this session. aaron swift 32:28 smartthings find launched last year as a service to enable customers to locate galaxy devices such as phones, watches earbuds, your s pen pro, like whatever you might leave on the bus or the train accidentally. it comprises more than 100 million find nodes. and over 230,000 devices are located every day. tony morelan 32:49 so a find no just to clarify, find note is that like another device that's this part of this network, aaron swift 32:55 yeah, like a phone or a tablet, a galaxy phone or a galaxy tablet, running the smartthings app with smartthings. fine. and as you saw, philip and moon did a great presentation. talking about other hardware oems can now integrate their products with smart things fine. so we have today our first smart tag device which you could attach to your keys that's available on the market now for everyone. but anyone who wants to can start building their own tag devices or integrating their hardware products into the final. tony morelan 33:29 yeah, i think that opening up the smartthings five network to the outside hardware oems is going to be huge and will absolutely expand the network tremendously. aaron swift 33:39 yeah. and they made a set of tools. there's this fine device sdk and the test suites. they make it really easy for any device manufacturer, whether it's ble, or ultra-wideband, to start integrating their devices. if you're using the nordic dialogue or nxp chipset. yeah, it's really easy to add the fine sdk into your device for certification. tony morelan 34:01 that's going to be that's going to be great. there was a session called smart things build and tell me what were some of the highlights for you in that session. aaron swift 34:09 that session was led by jenny brand. meyer and andy sayer are director of product management and director of engineering. okay, and they talked about extending our platform, which historically has been very end user focus, you are buying samsung tvs and appliances for your home. and now we're extending the platform for multifamily builders and apartment managers to put in the new apartment buildings. okay, there's a new toolset with that, that will allow an installer to go set up hundreds of apartments and hundreds of refrigerators and dishwashers and washing machines and apartments really tony morelan 34:46 quickly. so this is giving them the ability to sort of monitor the like what's happening with the with these devices. if there's you know, you've got some sort of fault that happens within the system, they can detect that. aaron swift 34:58 yeah, so property managers we'll be able to integrate your monitor their fleet of samsung appliances from their property management tool. are there any tony morelan 35:08 apis or sdks? related to this? aaron swift 35:12 yeah, so one of the cool things about this new offering is there's a dedicated set of tools and api and sdk set to make it easy for property management software companies, like in trata, to come integrate and provide fleet management for all of the appliances. tony morelan 35:28 the one thing that comes to mind, though, when you mentioned something about, you know, giving property managers, the ability to sort of monitor all these devices that are in these homes, comes down to privacy, what's in place related to privacy, when you're talking about something like this aaron swift 35:43 user privacy is front of mind to us, whether you are a home owner or a renter. and so what we've done is we put together a new set of permissions on the platform, so that property managers only have the minimum access to data coming off of the appliance is needed to troubleshoot for failures. got it. if there happens to be something wrong, the property managers will be able to pull some information off of the appliances to troubleshoot the air, but they cannot tell that you're getting your 11pm glass of milk before you go to bed. tony morelan 36:18 yeah, the last thing i need is my property manager knowing that i was in my freezer last night going for little ice cream bins. aaron swift 36:24 right, right. and so we've made sure that users are front of mind in this, that's, that's great, and that their privacy is protected. tony morelan 36:31 yeah, that's super important. there was also a session called smartthings edge. and i thought this was really interesting. this is where the execution is done locally without reliance on the cloud. tell me more about that session. aaron swift 36:44 in summer 2020, we announced major changes coming to our platform, this session ended up being such a long session with so many great speakers, because we are really excited to be talking about those changes. sure. a couple of my favorite ones are from zack and vlad talking about smart things edge before, when you use smart things. to turn on a light with a motion sensor, your motion sensor would detect motion in your home, it would send that motion event to your hub up to the cloud, the cloud would tell you to run that automation, send the event back down to the hub to tell the light ball to turn on. sure. and that happened quickly. but it's not quite as natural as still being able to go turn on the light or the local motion sensor in your home. yeah. so what smartthings edge does is it took the device events and the automation event and was able to start processing them locally. yeah. so now when you use that motion sensor to turn on a light motion is detected that goes to the hub, the automation is processed on the hub, and sent back over to the light to turn off without ever having to reach out to the cloud to confirm that event. tony morelan 37:56 like what would be a device where you needed like instant, instant, you know, reaction time between the hub and the and the device. aaron swift 38:05 so all zigbee and z wave and wi fi devices have the ability to run locally on the hub now with automations. okay, so one of the most natural feeling ones is that example i gave with the light you want light to turn on right away? yeah. similarly, if you want to be walking into a room and having the temperatures change, or having the vents open and close, the thermostat adjusts. those are great use cases for local automations as well. okay, what we're doing now is we're investing more features into the rules api to make more automations. run locally. got it. so over time, you'll see more and more complex automations be able to run locally on your hub tony morelan 38:43 for edge devices. is it a closed ecosystem? or is it can anyone build for edge? aaron swift 38:49 great question. so we've released a collection of edge devices on our smartthings developers github repository that anyone can reference. and then any hardware oem can add their fingerprint or their devices to that repository. anyone can build their own edge devices if they want to. tony morelan 39:10 wow, that's, that's, that's great. so i saw there was a highlight session building the future smart home today that talked about the new matter standard. can you tell me what was shared in that in that session? aaron swift 39:21 matter is the foundation for smart homes of the future? over 200 companies have come together to develop a standard that is going to be the basis for smart home devices to integrate in the future. tony morelan 39:34 would you say that like today the is the ecosystem? is it pretty fragmented? aaron swift 39:39 correct. there are all sorts of different smart home standards from all sorts of different companies out there, and each one operates just a little bit different from each other, which makes it hard for device manufacturers to integrate with each platform. mater is going to take that fragmentation and create a common application language and data model that will apply across all the data from smartphone platforms, regardless of tony morelan 40:02 yeah, i think that's going to be great, especially for consumers so that they don't have to like decide between which technologies they want to, to purchase that it's all going to kind of seamlessly work together. aaron swift 40:12 correct. and if you buy a light bulb with the with the matter logo on it, you will know that it'll work with smart things, or any other matters supported ecosystem. tony morelan 40:21 that's awesome. that is super, super great to hear. so you've talked a lot about all these different technologies related to smart things. what's the best way for developers to learn even more about smart things? aaron swift 40:34 the best place to go for more information is developer.samsung.com/smartthings from there you can learn more about building edge devices or cloud devices or stay tuned for future updates on our investment in matter you know all of the sdc sessions on smartthings were great are there any other sessions that you would recommend developers checkout. i'm personally a bit of a tv nerd. so i'm really excited for redefining the experience of watching tv. and what's new in samsung smart tv services. tony morelan 41:04 yeah, no, i know, a bunch of the people over the tv plus and it's a great group and doing a lot of amazing things over there. a lot of great content coming out. that's exciting. excellent. hey, aaron, i really appreciate you coming on the podcast. it was great chatting with you and learning a bit more about smart things and looking forward to chatting with you again in the in the near future. aaron swift 41:22 great. thanks, tony. tony morelan 41:26 so next, i'd like to welcome roger kibbe to the podcast senior developer evangelist for bixby samsung's intelligent assistant technology. welcome, roger. roger kibbe 41:35 well, thanks. you and i talked. gosh, was probably over a year ago. yeah, actually on the podcast. so i'm excited to be back and talk to you about what's new and what we just saw at sdc. yeah. tony morelan 41:47 so it was i think about a year and a half ago. safe to say that a lots happened since then. so tell me what is the latest with bixby developers? roger kibbe 41:55 yeah, so we just announced several things that sdc are highlighted some things that changed. first thing i want to talk about is some of the ways we've made it easier to develop for bixby and these weren't new announcements, but kind of highlighting some of the changes we've made over the past year or so. and so a lot of these are focusing on improving the developer experience, one of the things we did is we created a new training ui. so use the training ui to create natural language training. and one of the great challenges and voice experiences is to get your natural language training, working well. after all, it's the way users interact with all the business logic that you've written. so that's a great challenge. and so we built a new ui to make that more intuitive and hopefully easier and simpler to build great experiences. we also built something we call the component gallery. because bixby is on multimodal devices, there is a ui for bixby experience. and the component gallery is a wysiwyg component editor. so i'm writing some code for what we call bixby views, i can pop up the component gallery, configure something graphically, and it just dumps the code right in. so it just makes it easier. and then finally, we made it super simple to load a capsule directly from github. so we have a bunch of sample code on github. and now directly in the studio. you can load that sample code from github without having to go and clone it or download it and go through all the previous hassles he had to do. so just an example of some of the improvements we made to make it frankly, just easier if your day to day life as a developer developing something for bixby tony morelan 43:32 awesome. so let me ask on the end, that component gallery actually was watching one of the sdc sessions on that is pretty cool. so just to clarify, this is where like on the device when you give a voice prompt, and the device bixby reacts to that you can then have graphic images appearing on the device. is that correct? roger kibbe 43:50 yeah, yeah. so you can either when you're basically whenever bixby is communicating with the user, you can actually have a graphical ui on there that's complimentary. and it also could have things like buttons on it, or sliders or controls, because one of the things is all these samsung devices. so you know, the phone, the watch the television, the tv, all have a ui on there. so bixby is not just a voice experience, but it's really a multimodal experience. so you need to build graphical ui, we built a tool to make it pretty darn easy to do so. tony morelan 44:26 so i heard a bit about bixby on windows. tell me tell me about this new announcement. roger kibbe 44:30 yeah, so brand new. so bixby is available on the galaxy book notebooks. so there's the samsung's newest notebooks. so bixby is right there is a command key to launch bixby can turn on hi bixby so you can talk to your windows notebook. you can ask questions and you can have it control smartthings home automation, you can ask it to find files you can ask them to change windows settings. so right now, you know it's focused on a fairly narrow set of things. but i'm super excited about we have this brand-new device, a windows laptop, what can you do with a voice front end in front of that? and what are ways where we can make it simpler and easier for a user to use their laptop? by talking to it? to my mind? there's a lot to be discovered there. yeah, what we created is kind of step one in a journey toward, you know, making voice a modality that makes it easier for us to interact with our technology, which is what it's all about. yeah, exactly. tony morelan 45:31 and you had mentioned smart things. there was a session at sdc titled enabling intelligent voice control on your iot devices. and i know in that they talked about smart things and a lot about bixby tell me, what were some of the key takeaways for you from that session? roger kibbe 45:45 yeah. so we introduced something called the bixby home platform, and it's a way of interfacing what you've done a big sweet voice with some of the smart things capabilities. and the best way to explain it is for me to give some examples of what you can do. and so first example is i might say hi, bixby turn on the dining room lights. now if i'd set up dining room lights in smart things, boom, work great today. but if i hadn't set up something called dining room lights, today, bixby re prompt you? or say, i can't find dining room lights, that's not a really good user experience. sure. so what you can set up with the bixby home platform is a lot more smarter logics. so hi, bixby turn on the dining room lights, because we can say sorry, i can't find dining room lights, but you have kitchen lights, your bedroom lights, you have den lights? which one would you like to turn on? and so then you kind of the user asked for something that it didn't understand. but at a set of airing out? it's like, well, i know you wanted to turn a light on. yeah, here's the lights i can turn on. and so i kind of prompted the user to, you know, what's the right can you want, much like we would do, frankly, a natural conversation. tony morelan 47:00 exactly. if roger kibbe 47:01 you ask me something that i didn't understand, i'd probably go can you clarify that? right. yeah. and so and this is a little bit of adding that kind of logic there. so i think that's one great example of just a quote unquote, air becoming a success. sure. the other thing i want to highlight, and i think this is where it gets really interesting, and frankly, pretty sexy, to me, is where you're actually taking the voice input. and you're taking what the iot device, its state and what it's sensing and combining them for some intelligent response. okay, so let me let me give you an example. so i could say hi bixby, turn on my air purifier, yeah, buy an air purifier, boom, today would turn it on. all good. but now with the bixby home platform, i can set it up. so when i say hi bixby turn on the air purifier, instead of instantly turning on, i can go query the air purifier and say, hey, you know, what's, what's the air quality? okay, and if air quality was moderate, or acceptable, boom, i just turn it on. and the default fan speed, maybe medium is on. but let's say the air quality is poor. well, then when i query it back and says, oh, air quality is poor. now i can say, well, you want to turn it on. and the air quality is poor. i'll turn it on. but i'm actually going to turn on and turn the fan to high. so you're getting this this feedback loop? it's really, you're getting the user what they asked for, you're getting the state of an iot device. you're combining those together? yeah. and then the action is just smarter. to my mind, this is pretty, i say, sexy and exciting. because if you think about this, this is getting into much more intelligence. sure. the devices know, i know what you asked for, i know the state, i'm going to take the most intelligent action based upon those two inputs. and that's what bixby home platform is all about. it's really a development tool that lets you build experiences, like what i was just talking about. tony morelan 48:59 yeah, i absolutely love that. and i loved when he said in the session, that there's they're planning to open this up to partners and also to third party devices. yeah, reach is going to be huge. roger kibbe 49:10 absolutely. well, i mean, i think that's one of the big things with a smartthings ecosystem, right is it's not just for samsung devices, but it's for, you know, devices from dozens or hundreds of manufacturers. so if i can read some information on the device, i can get that information and i can do something very logical and just make things work more intelligently. isn't that what we all want from our technology? tony morelan 49:32 exactly, yeah. so on that note, you know, something i saw also very interesting in that session was the bixby home studio. i absolutely love the whole idea of, you know, with your mouse, you can just drag and drop it and build out, you know, these experiences, all without coding. yeah, that's on bixby home studio. so like that is roger kibbe 49:50 the tooling behind what the experiences that i just talked about, so that you could intuitively built out, i use that air purifier example. because actually, if you look at the session, they built out that exact experience. and i think except i encourage people to go take a look at that. because that is a really good way to kind of understand what i'm talking about, and hopefully get you excited about, huh, wow, there's something cool that i could build as an end user experience. tony morelan 50:22 yeah. and the demo they gave was pretty in depth. i mean, this is not just a you know, they didn't just skim over the, you know, the concept of bixby home studio, they actually went through and built it out. yes, it was pretty nice. so that was an awesome session. but i know there were a bunch of other sessions all kind of related to, you know, smart things in bixby. what were some of the other sessions that you would suggest developers to check out? roger kibbe 50:44 yeah, so i would definitely check out the two bixby sessions that we that we mentioned. and as you can see, a lot of the focus is on bixby and smart things. yeah. so if you're a bixby developer, i would suggest you check out some of the spark thing sessions and understand that, because i think a lot of the focus of what we're looking at is, hey, how do we get home controller devices to work super, super well with voice so that and that really is a dance between what bixby is doing and what smartthings is doing, and building that together. and that's what the bixby home studio is all about. so understand the two sides of the equation and then you'll understand and hopefully can build some really cool tony morelan 51:27 stuff. yeah, i love the collaboration that's happening between smartthings and bixby so if developers want to learn more about bixby what's the what's the best way? roger kibbe 51:37 i yeah, so first thing would be go to bixbydevelopers.com and that's a homepage for everything bixby that's download the studio, where we have our documentation, and just a bunch of information. the other thing is we have a pretty active youtube channel. so just look for bixby developers on youtube, youtube slash bixby developers, loads and then pretty much everything we do that's new, or we introduce a new youtube video, we would definitely post that to twitter. okay, so that's twitter. and that's bixby developers. and then i do a weekly like tech tip of the week, like a two-minute video tutorial, and that's posted to twitter as well or also facebook so you can find that on facebook. and then finally, i am the host of a podcast. yeah, i guess focuses on all things voice not just bixby it is called bixby developers chat. you can find it in your favorite podcast player or you should be able to ask your voice assistant hi bixby play bixby developers chat, podcast or another voice assistant and all of them should be able to play it. so that is another resource. tony morelan 52:45 that's awesome. and it's a great podcast i have listened to your to your work you do you do an excellent job from one podcaster to another. roger kibbe 52:52 well, thank you. that's the kind of compliment you'd like to hear because we all understand the challenges and what you need to do to make a great podcast tony morelan 53:01 guests and let me remind everyone go check out that episode. we did it was in the first season. with roger, you can learn a bunch more about bixby and how to get started creating voice assisted capsules. roger kibbe 53:11 well, thanks, tony. really appreciate it. and go check out those sdc videos to get a really more in depth understanding of the things we've talked about today. tony morelan 53:19 thanks, roger banks. one of the biggest announcements we made this past year is our latest watches now run on a new operating system called wear os powered by samsung. and joining me on the podcast today is su yong kim, one of the software engineers here at samsung that has worked closely on our new watch ecosystem. hey, sam. thanks for joining me on the podcast today. sooyeon kim 53:38 hi, tony. thanks for having me today. my name is yan qin and i'm a software engineer at samsung. i'm very excited today to briefly recap our sdc sessions on samsung galaxy watch and where it was powered by samsung, which we jointly built with google. tony morelan 53:55 yeah. so there were several sessions related to the new watch ecosystem in the unified platform. what would you say are the benefits of the new wear os powered by samsung? rooyen kim 54:04 so there are many, many benefits. but first, we have created a seamless and deeply connected experience across not only samsung galaxy devices, but also for wear smartwatches and android smartphones. with this new unified platform, we want to expand our ecosystem bring greater scale to our developer community, and at the same time, delight consumers with a variety of choices from watches to watch faces and apps. tony morelan 54:33 yeah, it's true. not only this, the developer community going to expand it but also the consumer reach is going to grow even wider. can you talk about the growth of the smartwatch market over the past several years? sooyeon kim 54:44 well, the smartwatch market is continuously growing. and in fact, according to counterpoint research shipments grew by 35% for the first quarter of 2021 compared to last year. and after samsung galaxy watch for launch before august, we once again recognize this explosive growth and will continue to work hard to meet the demands of this growing market. tony morelan 55:08 yeah, i agree as smartwatches get smarter than market demand is only going to increase. can you tell me what are some of the new and exciting apps available for the new wear os powered by samsung? sooyeon kim 55:19 so users can enjoy familiar samsung apps like samsung pay smartthings and bixby. but now google apps are also available like google maps, and youtube music. we are also partnering with a wide variety of partners and developers on apps that are available for download from the play store on your watch. on your phone. there is also a dedicated category for watch apps, so you can easily browse and download them directly to your watch. tony morelan 55:46 yeah, i love that youtube music is now available on galaxy watch for many people are buying the watch because they like to track workouts and have an active lifestyle and listening to music has always been a key component to working out. can you tell me how is the new samsung galaxy watch for taking advantage of the health and wellness market? sooyeon kim 56:03 so we want to help users keep track of their health status and fitness activities. so we brought groundbreaking health features and sophisticated sensors to our new samsung galaxy watch four. in selected markets. users can check body composition, blood pressure, electrocardiogram skeletal muscle mass based on the tablet grade water, fat percentage, and so on. tony morelan 56:26 yeah, it's absolutely amazing that with this little device on your wrist, you can now check things like skeletal muscle mass and fat percentage and can conduct an ekg test. can current android developers build watch apps for the new wireless powered by samsung and publish just as they've done before. sooyeon kim 56:41 so we aim to make every step of watch app development from ease of bill to market launch as simple as possible with this new unified platform. so yes, android developers, you can continue to build your apps within this familiar environment. using android studio with watch emulators and existing and new wear os specific api's. developers can also deploy and increase exposure for their apps with the watch apps category on the google play store. tony morelan 57:11 yeah, so my background is in graphic design. and for me, my biggest question was, were we going to build a new tool that would allow designers to create watch faces for the new unified platform? and when they learned the answer was yes, i was really excited. so what are some of the new exciting features with the new west powered by samsung watch base design tool, watch face studio, sooyeon kim 57:31 anyone can download, design and publish watch faces for whereas on the play store, you don't have to learn how to code and just need to explore the new design tool watch face studio. for more details. there is a separate tech talk session on this. tony morelan 57:45 yeah, so that session was called introducing the new watch face studio, it was a great overview of the new tool that showed just how easy it is for someone to create a watch face without any coding. what are some of the other sessions from sdc21 that watch face developers should check out? sooyeon kim 57:59 oh, first there is the highlight session watch ecosystem or new era where we cover the new samsung galaxy watch ecosystem at a high level. then there are tick tock sessions, build your app. and the new watch ecosystem is where we specifically talk about watch app development and run through a range of api's by inviting a special guest from google. and there is also a session on a new health platform that runs on where was powered by samsung. tony morelan 58:27 yeah, there were a lot of great sessions all related to wearables, and lots of new opportunities for developers. what is the best way for developers to learn more about the new watch ecosystem? sooyeon kim 58:36 for developers, i encourage visiting the samsung developers and the android developer sites, you can go to developer.samsung.com/galaxy-watch and also developer.android.com/where i really appreciate you coming on to the podcast today and giving your insight in to the new watch ecosystem super exciting times thanks tony thanks for inviting me so. tony morelan 58:51 i'd like to welcome back to the podcast, eric clung injure, who leads developer relations at samsung. eric and i did a pre sdc podcast where we gave a little preview on what to expect it sdc21, and highlights from some of our past developer conferences. if you haven't checked out that episode yet, be sure to go back in and give it a listen. eric, welcome back to the podcast. eric cloninger 59:22 hey, tony, that was a lot of fun. you know, we've been doing conferences for years. and even though sdc21 was a virtual conference, it was a lot of work and a lot of work by a lot of people at samsung, yourself included. and you know, i'd like to really give a shout out to everybody who put in a lot of effort a lot of late nights and all on it. so i hope that the people who listened to the keynote and the spotlight session and all the technical sessions got something out of it. yeah. and hopefully next year, we can do this live. yeah, tony morelan 59:54 no, i'm looking forward to that. but yes, it was. it was a great virtual conference. so i've asked eric to join me on this episode to chat about the sdc session that i gave called grow your podcast audience with samsung. eric cloninger 1:00:06 earlier this year, samsung made it really easy for device users to listen to podcasts. can you share? what is the new podcast platform? tony morelan 1:00:14 yeah, so the new podcast platform, it's super easy to access from your device on the home screen, all you do is swipe left, which is our minus one screen. that is samsung free, which is basically free entertainment from samsung all in one place. there's four tabs there. so there's the watch tab, which is if you wanted to stream tv, there's the read tab, if you want it to read news, there's the play tab, which is playing games. and then of course, there is the listen tab, which is all about listening to podcasts. eric cloninger 1:00:47 so who can access all of that content with samsung free? yeah, so tony morelan 1:00:50 samsung free is available on all of our latest devices. so this is basically the note devices and s series going all the way back to s nine plus all the versions of z fold in z flip. right now samsung free is only available in the us but we are expanding to europe soon. i've been told that by the end of the year, we will be hitting some european countries. eric cloninger 1:01:12 that's great. so why did we launch a new podcast service? tony morelan 1:01:15 samsung's podcast strategy is to make it easy for the millions of samsung device users to listen to their favorite podcast shows and discover new episodes quickly and easily. and also it gives publishers an impactful way to reach new listeners and really expand their audience. eric cloninger 1:01:31 so how do those publishers bring their shows to samsung. so grab tony morelan 1:01:34 your url from your podcast rss feed, and you can find that from your podcast hosting provider, take that rss feed in go to samsung podcast.com. sign up for a free samsung account. and all you do is fill out a short form that allows you to import your rss feed url. typically, it takes less than five minutes for you to fill out that form. and that quickly, your show is now available on all of the samsung free devices. eric cloninger 1:02:00 so what samsung free and the podcast platform doing to help publishers get their shows discovered. tony morelan 1:02:05 so our editorial team is always looking for new and exciting shows to promote. every week, we feature about seven new shows on our homepage. and these promotional features have been extremely valuable for publishers. in fact, there was one publisher in mind recently, marty ray project chats he saw a 2,000% increase in downloads just after being featured on our homepage. so that was really great to see the value in that promotion for him. eric cloninger 1:02:29 yeah, that's incredible numbers there. so you're the host of our podcast, the samsung developer podcast. is that how you got involved with the podcast platform team? tony morelan 1:02:39 exactly. they reached out to me when they were first building the service and eventually asked if i would help promote it. i said, absolutely. that's when they asked me to present an sdc. so you can check out my session and learn much more about the new podcast platform. eric cloninger 1:02:53 right. so the sdc content that is on the website is available for anyone to see at any time. so are there any other sessions on the sdc21 website that potential podcasters and developers should check out? tony morelan 1:03:10 yeah, well, i would say what really got me excited was seeing all of the game focus sessions that we had up there. so there's one session called galaxy store games focused developer friendly. that was a great session on all the new game focused improvements for both gamers and developers. and there was another session called games for everyone that samsung instant plays. it's another great session for game developers to learn how to bring their html5 games directly to galaxy store, making it easy for users to play games without having to download and install anything. eric cloninger 1:03:42 that is an exciting new way for people who are interested in playing casual games to get into something new without having to download hundreds of megabytes of content. so i think that's going to be a game changer for all of us. yeah, definitely. so tony, thank you for giving us some insight on the new podcast platform. and also for sitting down with different people associated with sdc21. it was a fantastic virtual conference. and it was great to hear about the sessions on one ui, the incubation program smart things in bixby tony morelan 1:04:11 yeah. and i also like the interviews that we did on our new watch ecosystem, you know, chatting with dan again on samsung internet. that was great. and, of course, our new podcast platform. i'd like to thank all of my guests today and to you, eric for taking a moment to chat about sdc21. eric cloninger 1:04:27 thank you very much, tony. closing 1:04:30 looking to start creating for samsung. download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all. sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store. check out developer.samsung.com today and start your journey with samsung. tony morelan 1:04:46 the pow! podcast is brought to you by samsung developers and produced us by tony morelan
