Samsung Galaxy S8: When Will Bixby Arrive Outside South Korea?

By Shiena Bernardino, Christian Post Contributor Friday, July 07, 2017

Samsung Galaxy S8 owners have been enjoying the latest flagship unit since its release in April. But it still lacks one of its major features.

When the South Korean tech giant unveiled the newest generation of its flagship smartphone product, it claimed that it will introduce a brand-new voice-powered virtual assistant called Bixby. The company even included a Bixby-dedicated button on the side of the device. However, the feature is still not functioning in most places outside South Korea.

According to reports, Samsung is scheduled to roll out in the U.S. in spring, but the season already ended without any updates regarding the release date of Bixby in the country.

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Reports also cited an information from The Korea Herald, saying that the tech giant might be encountering two issues that may have caused the delay of Bixby's release. According to a company spokesperson, they are having a hard time making the virtual app work in different languages.

"Developing Bixby in other languages is taking more time than we expected mainly because of the lack of the accumulation of big data," the spokesperson reportedly said.

It also mentioned that the engineers from the U.S. and South Korea who are working on the virtual assistant are also having communication problems due to their language and geographical barriers.

"Many engineers in the US are making full efforts to develop the English version. But, (due to geographical and language barriers) their frequent reports to and communication with the management located in Korea makes the progress much slower than developing the Korean version here."

While Samsung has yet to confirm the release date of Bixby's English-language version, it can be speculated that it might finally come out sometime this fall since the company already rolled out the beta test for several U.S.-based Samsung Galaxy S8 owners in June. This could also coincide with the release of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 8 in the coming months.