The Galaxy S8 won’t have the Bixby Voice Assistant at launch according to Samsung who has reportedly issued a statement that says the voice assistant won’t be available on the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8+ until later in the Spring. While Spring has already started and the Galaxy S8 is launching officially soon, “launching later in the Spring” means it could end up launching just before the Summer starts which is still a couple of months away.
To clarify, Bixby itself as a piece of software will be launching with both devices, and Samsung has already confirmed this when they announced Bixby officially alongside both of their new flagships back in March. While the voice control service won’t launch until a little bit later, users who purchase either the Galaxy S8 or the Galaxy S8+ will still be able to use Bixby to set reminders, and Bixby Vision as well as Bixby Home will also be accessible right from the start, so most of what Samsung had planned for Bixby in terms of functionality won’t be held back. Having said that though, Bixby Voice is the most functional part and the biggest part of the A.I. software and could very well be the portion that users were most excited for.
Samsung doesn’t explain the reasoning for holding this part of Bixby back and simply mentioned that it would be arriving later in the Spring, as mentioned above, so users will just have to sit and wait until Samsung believes it’s ready to push to consumers. It’s also been reported that the Spring-time launch of Bixby Voice will only be for U.S.-based consumers of Samsung’s latest smartphones and there is no word on when Samsung plans to roll the same feature out to other consumers across the globe. Bixby Voice is the part of the software that will enable users to control things by simply speaking to Bixby. So, if users want to initiate tasks or send messages and such, they’ll have to wait to use Bixby for this purpose, at least for now. Once Bixby Voice is ready for the public, Samsung will be be sending the feature out to users through a software update.