According to a leaked image that was posted on reddit, it appears that Bixby Voice will be launching next Tuesday, July 18th. This is the biggest feature of Bixby, and one that was heavily touted when the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus were announced earlier this year. Bixby Voice basically turns Bixby into a personal assistant that you can actually talk to. Instead of just being a page that shows different cards and such on your home screen. It was delayed due to the fact that Samsung didn’t have enough data for it to work properly in the US. It launched in beta in June and now it appears to be launching officially next week.
Bixby was a huge feature for the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, at least in Samsung’s eyes. It even put a dedicated Bixby button on the side of the phone. But for many, it’s been a pretty big let down. Bixby was meant to be another competitor to the Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana and even Apple’s Siri, but so far it hasn’t lived up to that. There are some pretty cool features for Bixby, like Bixby Vision, where you can take a photo of something and Bixby will identify it, and if it’s a product, it’ll direct you to a place where you can purchase it. Or at least it’s supposed to do that. It doesn’t, at least not most of the time.
While this should be treated with a grain of salt, since it is a leak, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Samsung officially launched Bixby Voice on July 18th. So if you do have a Galaxy S8 or a Galaxy S8 Plus, be on the lookout next week for this update. It’ll likely be coming out of the Samsung Galaxy Apps store, where most of Samsung’s apps are located these days. This release is said to be only for the US at this point, and not for many of the other countries that the Galaxy S8 is sold in. This is likely due to the different languages and dialects spoken in other parts of the world.