After a delay of 3 months, Samsung Bixby is finally rolling out to the Galaxy S8 here in the United States and in South Korea. The update to bring Bixby to the S8 devices and brings along all of the normal features of a personal assistant along with a few Samsung features too.
Bixby was heavily touted in the lead up to the launch of the Galaxy S8 but expectations fell well short when the device shipped without the assistant. Indeed, the dedicated hardware button on the S8 phones for Bixby couldn’t even be remapped initially although some developers found ways around it – which Samsung kept knocking down. Without remapping, you pretty much had a useless button on your phone until now.
According to the announcement from Samsung, Bixby will be able to do some unique things that other assistants like Google
Samsung Bixby
Assistant and Amazon Alexa can’t do.
Bixby can complete more complex tasks like creating a photo album of all the pictures a user took last week and calling it “Vacation,” and then sharing those photos with family and friends. Users can have Bixby remember things and remind, such as “remember this is where I parked,” or “remind me to pick up eggs and milk at the grocery store.”
The debate, of course, is does the world need another personal assistant and, maybe more importantly, will Bixby be successful? With Google Assistant widely available across a number of devices, as well as Amazon Alexa, Samsung is coming into the game very late and will have to continually improve their AI to catch up and offer unique features.
Anyway, Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus owners, look for an update to enable Bixby hitting your phones any time now and drop me a comment and let me know what you think.
