English-speaking Bixby finally launches in the US

Samsung showed off its stunning Galaxy S8 flagship devices at the end of March this year, when it also unveiled the Bixby AI voice assistant for the first time. However, up until recently, Bixby could only speak Korean and its release in the US was delayed, allegedly due to lack of language resources. Samsung did launch a Bixby Early Access Program in the US last month that gave Galaxy S8 and S8+ owners a preview of some of the software’s features, but not to the full thing.

Nonetheless, Sammy announced today that Bixby in US English is now available on S8 devices in the US and South Korea. In order to start using it, users would first need to update the software to its latest version, and then use the dedicated Bixby button on the side, or simply say “Hi Bixby” to launch the assistant.

Bixby is intended to be more than a “do-this-or-that” tool and is capable of learning and understanding your behaviour and preferences. Samsung is particularly proud of Bixby’s ability to easily switch between voice, touch or text commands, and has claimed this ability as a competitive edge over other contemporary mobile voice assistants.

Bixby is deeply integrated into Samsung’s core apps and is capable of fulfilling multi-step or cross-app commands. Support for third-party apps is still not as rich as Sammy intends it to be, but the Korean company has assured us that Bixby Labs is on track to integrate the software with more apps. The thing with Bixby is that once it has gotten to ‘know’ an app, it is able to work with different features and aspects of that app, and not just a few of its core functions.

The company has already launched a coupe of handsets that work with Bixby, such as the Galaxy A7 (2017) and the Note Fan Edition, but only the S8 lineup officially supports the AI on US soil. Nonetheless, at present, you could get Bixby on older devices that run on Android Nougat, but you would need to follow certain steps first.

In any case, Samsung’s announcement today explicitly states that Bixby will indeed ‘learn’ more languages and will come to more devices in the future, so we should just sit back and wait.


source: Samsung