After months of delay, Samsung is finally bringing Bixby’s much anticipated voice support to supported Samsung Galaxy devices. The much-awaited feature will be rolling out today and while the other features of Bixby have always been accessible, the voice functionality is what completes its core set of functions.
Samsung did make the voice capabilities available for beta-testing for users in the US and owing to the feedback, the functionality has significantly grown and has provided faster response times as well as improved comprehension and understanding of the questions being framed. The early-bird access was made available to 100,000 users of Samsung’s flagship devices and there have been over 4 million voice-over commands issued since. Bixby can now also read out SMS messages and emails on Samsung’s stock apps.
The three-month waiting period for the launch of the voice assistant Bixby in English has been a long time coming, however, only the US has access to it as it has not made its way to other countries such as the UK, Australia, Canada and other English-speaking nations. While Bixby was able to launch in Korea with its home country’s language, it proved to be too difficult for the company to emulate the same on time for the English-Speaking masses. This caused English-speaking owners to re-map the functions of the dedicated Bixby button for performing other tasks as even the Google Assistant is able to do all that the Bixby can, albeit a little differently.
While there was hope for Samsung to launch a competitor to Google Home and the Echo with its own smart speaker, it seems those plans have currently been scrapped by the company. The company, based on reports, has claimed that the feasibility of having a Bixby-powered speaker is rather slim as Amazon is dominating the home smart speaker space with a market share of 70 percent. While Samsung has already released the new voice capabilities for the Bixby AI assistant, that itself has taken time for the company to introduce to the US markets, with a delay of over three months. In the future, for a Bixby speaker to survive, it will not only have to contend with the existing market-dominating brands such as Amazon and Google, but will also have to compete with Apple’s own HomePod and the Essential Home, which will both come with English language natively supported at launch.