Samsung Bixby Release Date: AI Assistant Rolls Out on S8 Smartphones Worldwide

By Jessica Ferrera, Christian Post Contributor Friday, August 25, 2017

After experiencing some hiccups, more than 200 countries around the world can now experience Samsung's own artificial intelligence assistant called Bixby.

Bixby is the AI assistant that was launched alongside the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ earlier this year.

In a press release, Samsung announced on Monday "that Bixby's voice capabilities have expanded to more than 200 countries and territories worldwide."

Samsung added: "In addition to South Korea and the United States, consumers in countries across the world, including the U.K., Australia, Canada and South Africa, will be able to utilize the intelligent interface to help them get things done faster and easier."

However, it is important to note that despite the global scope of the Bixby Voice release, the AI assistant can only understand a very limited set of languages: Korean and English.

On the other hand, Samsung promised that they still have plans of expanding the languages supported by Bixby Voice. "Samsung plans to continue expanding Bixby's voice capabilities to additional countries, languages, devices, features and third-party applications," the company stated.

Now, apart from pressing the dedicated Bixby button on the Galaxy S8 and S8+, users can activate the AI application by saying: "Hi, Bixby."

Back in April, Samsung hoped to release the Bixby assistant in time for the market release of Galaxy S8 and S8+. Unfortunately, the company experienced several delays which forced them to roll out the feature initially without the voice activation aspect.

After a few weeks since the Galaxy S8 and S8+ were launched globally, the smartphone users in Samsung's homeland, South Korea, were the first ones to experience Bixby Voice. Back then, developers were only able to add the country's native language to the AI's voice activation aspect.

At the time, Samsung promised to roll out Bixby Voice in the United States sometime in late spring. However, it did not happen. Then, in July, Samsung confirmed that they did not expect that the English-language Bixby Voice would take more time to be developed than planned.

A spokesperson from Samsung told The Verge back then: "Developing Bixby in other languages is taking more time than we expected mainly because of the lack of the accumulation of big data."