Samsung’s Bixby—A frustrating voice assistant with all the wrong features

Bixby versus the Google Assistant. Video edited by Justin Wolfson. (video link)

Bixby-Samsung's voice assistant designed to take on Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google's Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana-has finally been released. Its launch has already been a bumpy one-Bixby was supposed to launch three months ago with the Galaxy S8, and while that happened in Korea, getting Bixby to master English has resulted in delay after delay.

Normally, late software wouldn't be a huge deal for the Galaxy S8 launch, but Samsung felt so strongly about pairing Bixby with the Galaxy S8 that it built a hardware button onto the device specifically for Bixby. During the long delay, S8 customers created apps that turned the Bixby button into a general-purpose "convenience" key-a button users can configure themselves. But Samsung didn't like this. The company pushed out a series of updates designed to disable apps that changed the Bixby button and earned a good deal of ire from customers.

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