There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the new S8s; beautiful edge-to-edge screens with virtual home buttons, new 10nm processors, DeX desktop support, Bluetooth 5.0 with dual audio streaming, a headphone jack and free high-quality AKG earphones out of the box.
However, when the Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphones were released over a month ago, there was this one much-hyped feature that failed to be fully functional on day one.
Bixby — the Galaxy S8’s digital assistant was supposed to be Samsung’s answer to the Siris, Alexas, Cortanas, and Google Homes of the tech world — but its voice controls were delayed.
Bixby’s struggling to comprehend English!
According to Samsung at that time, the S8 and S8 Plus will have Bixby’s voice controls and support for the English language turned on via software update toward the end of May this year.
Now that May is over, we have bad news for Samsung Galaxy S8 owners. It looks like the English version of Bixby has been delayed again until at least late June.
The reason for the delay is unclear but according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Bixby is still struggling to understand English syntax and grammar.
“Bixby Voice benefits from time to further enhance natural language understanding, and we are currently growing our user testing in the U.S. to prepare for launch,” stated a Samsung spokesperson to address the delay.
Samsung claims that Bixby will allow S8 owners to completely control everything on their phones via voice but currently it’s just limited to Bixby Vision (image searches), Home and Reminder.
Interestingly, Bixby’s Korean counterpart was available on the Galaxy S8 since release day, which indicates that there may be localization issues with Bixby’s English language development.
According to the WSJ report, although Samsung acquired Viv, the creators of Siri, last year, Bixby is not employing any of the Viv assets it has acquired. It is instead based on the Galaxy S7’s S-Voice technology.
While the U.S. version of Bixby’s unfinished state is a cause of frustration for Galaxy S8 owners, we’re hoping that Samsung will sort it out as promised and Bixby should evolve soon into something more than a generic voice control and search assistant.
Are you a Galaxy S8 owner? Is the English Bixby delay a cause for concern? Drop us a comment!