Bixby finally comes to America

After much delay, a lot of bashing and total frustration, Samsung’s Bixby virtual assistant is finally releasing in the US. The company said in a blog post today that it has begun rolling out the Bixby for Galaxy S8 and S8 plus users in the US. The update, to be released today, will allow owners of the Galaxy S8 and S8+ to gain voice capabilities for the service.

“Due to a rich legacy of mobile innovation, Samsung is uniquely positioned to offer a mobile experience and solutions that seamlessly integrate with, and power, its devices. As the heart of Samsung’s offerings, Bixby’s intelligent interface was designed to power users’ devices, apps and services, allowing easy control of smartphones and beyond,” said Samsung in a statement.

 The assistant was supposed to release with the launch of Samsungs Flagship phone, the S8, but was delayed after Bixby found it hard to learn English. Although the assistant was available in Korean, the US and European users had to wait for months listening to the delays surrounding Bixby’s English launch. Now finally, users in the US will be able to navigate their device, make calls, set tasks and more using their voice thanks to Bixby.

According to Samsung, after the launch Bixby ‘will be integrated across core Samsung apps, so almost anything you could do with touch or typing, you can now do with your voice, including multi-step, and cross-app requests. Support for additional native and third-party apps will be available via Bixby Labs, which includes select applications that are offering preliminary integration with Bixby.’

“At Samsung, we are dedicated to creating the best possible user experience for our customers. That’s why we designed Bixby – it’s an intelligent interface that allows you to do more things with your phone. We want to offer a truly multimodal experience, so that users can interact with their phone in many different ways – through sight, touch, typing or voice – all of the most natural ways to interact with the world, available on your smartphone,” says Injong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services of Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics. “And as the Bixby ecosystem grows, it will use its completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance to evolve from a smartphone interface to the interface for your life.”