The Bixby button on the side of Samsung’s fantastic Galaxy S8 is finally getting its most important feature: voice support. The company has started rolling out an update to enable Bixby Voice for Galaxy S8 and S8+ owners in the United States who signed up to test Samsung’s rival to Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana. It’s in very early beta — this is day one — and Samsung will be putting more work into the feature before Bixby Voice is widely released. That’s a very good thing, because the outlook is pretty rough at launch. If you’re going to actually start pushing that Bixby button several times a day, Samsung’s got real work to do.
First things first. If you registered to be a beta tester, make sure you’re running the current version of Bixby by going to its “about” screen. Download any updates that appear there. I also had to clear the data and cache for Bixby apps in my S8+’s settings screen before Bixby Voice appeared. Once it does, you’ll get a tutorial that involves teaching you how to trigger the voice feature and then teaching it to recognize your voice.
You can activate Bixby Voice either by saying “Hi Bixby” (“hey” also seems to work) or just holding down the Bixby button while you talk, walkie-talkie style. From there, you can ask it the basics like the weather or the time in London or to set an alarm. And right there — the core fundamentals — is where Bixby starts to stumble out of the gate. It can definitely tell you the weather without issue. No problem. But things go downhill from there.
For one, it’s often slow and noticeably sluggish compared to Google Assistant. Ask Bixby what time it is somewhere and it’ll launch the whole clock app and then read off the answer. Identifying the president of the United States, a simple ask of Siri or Google Assistant, seems to be a confounding challenge for Bixby. The best it will do is punt you to a Google search. Often times, it completely fails to answer the question altogether. There doesn’t seem to be any knowledge base that it’s pulling answers from. If you’re not asking it to do something on your device, Bixby needs help.
Even the essential task of text messaging someone is surprisingly hard to pull off. For one, you’ve got to use Samsung’s Messages app as your default SMS app. And if you don’t word things exactly right, it won’t happen. “Text mom and ask ‘how are you’” sent me to a Google search. “Send a text to mom and ask ‘how are you’” worked — but still necessitated a few taps to fire off the message. What’s the point of voice, then? Google Assistant nailed it with a single attempt.