Shortly before the Galaxy S8 launched in the U.S., Samsung revealed that its Bixby Voice feature wouldn’t debut alongside the GS8. Fast-forward a couple of months and Bixby Voice still hasn’t fully launched in the U.S., and a new report claims to have info on why that is.
The work of developing Bixby support for other languages is taking extra time because “of the lack of the accumulation of big data,” a Samsung spokesperson reportedly told The Korea Herald. Samsung apparently doesn’t have the wealth of data to apply to Bixby that other giant companies like Amazon and Google have, and so it’s taking Samsung longer to develop Bixby into a fully-formed feature.
Also said to be causing delays in Bixby’s development is the separation between Samsung’s engineers in the U.S. and management in Korea. Bixby has fully launched in South Korea where Samsung is based, but the distance and language barriers between Samsung’s U.S. and Korean teams is slowing the development of Bixby in languages other than Korean, says a Korea Herald source.
Samsung is currently running a Bixby early access program in the U.S. to help improve its virtual assistant. It’s still unclear when Bixby Voice will fully launch to the public in the U.S., but hopefully it happens soon, because Samsung placed a major focus on Bixby with the GS8, even dedicated a hardware button to the assistant on the side of its new flagship Android smartphone.
Are you in the Bixby early access program? If so, how is Bixby working for you so far?
