After scoring an immensely large number of pre-orders, Samsung started shipping out its latest flagship devices — the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus earlier last month. While everyone was much pleased with the aesthetics and Infinity display, most were rebuking the Korean giant for holding back one of the most significant features — its newly introduced AI assistant Bixby’s voice controls.
But, fast forward a month, ZDNet now reports that Samsung has started rolling out voice commands for its Bixby AI assistant on the Galaxy S8 lineup in its home country. The South Korean users who’ve recently purchased Samsung’s latest flagship phone would have received a notice (around 1:00 pm KST on Monday) saying the voice features are now live on their devices.
Playing catch to the ongoing artificial intelligence trend, Samsung has launched Bixby voice assistant in competition to assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana — who already reign the current market. The Korean giant’s assistant, officially launched on April 21st, can simply be employed to place calls, set alarms/reminders, schedule calendar appointments, launch applications and more.
In addition, Galaxy S8’s Bixby voice assistant also comes coupled with a vision feature, which can help you identify objects and show purchase options for similar options. This feature is powered by Pinterest’s visual discovery capabilities — a prominent focus for the community-focused platform at the moment.
As the voice controls for Samsung’s very own AI-powered virtual assistant begin to roll out in its home country, we are now highly expectant of the same making its way across to worldwide users soon. A timeline for the release of this much-awaited feature hasn’t yet been defined by the Korean hardware giant but Wall Street Journal suggests that it will roll out by the end of May.
Until then, you can try and play with the fourth dedicated hardware button for Bixby on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus. Though it is known that Samsung wants to prevent the remapping of this button, but you can still try and figure out a way around the same. After remapping this button, you’ll be able to call upon the services of a trusted benefactor such as Google Assistant rather than the amateur Bixby.
