Enlarge / The hardware Bixby button on the Galaxy S8. (credit: Ron Amadeo)
It has been almost three months since the launch of the Galaxy S8, and Samsung is finally ready to unleash an English-speaking version of Bixby on the world—well, on the US at least. Samsung announced today that its voice assistant can finally speak English, and it’s rolling out to the Galaxy S8 and S8+ now. The UK, Australia, Canada, and other English-speaking nations still don’t have Bixby, however.
When the Galaxy S8 was announced at the end of March, Bixby was a heavily promoted part of the phone. Samsung considered Bixby so core to the Galaxy S8 software package that Samsung actually added a hardware “Bixby” button to the side of the Galaxy S8—it looks just like a second power button and lives below the volume rocker. Bixby launched in Samsung’s home of Korea along with the Galaxy S8, but integrating English proved too hard of a task for Bixby to master in time for the Galaxy S8’s April US launch.
With no Bixby to use on their Bixby button, Galaxy S8 customers started remapping the button with third-party apps, turning it into a Blackberry-style “convenience key” that could be configured to launch anything. Samsung has been aggressively disabling these mods with software updates, insisting that the Bixby button is only to be used for Bixby.
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