Samsung AI-Upgraded Bixby Voice Assistant Coming This Year

A senior executive at Samsung Electronics has reportedly confirmed that the AI upgraded voice assistant Bixby will be launched this year.

Samsung’s mobile division boss TM Roh told CNBC that the firm will launch an upgraded version of its voice assistant Bixby this year based on its own artificial intelligence models.

The upgrading of Bixby with AI was first revealed in April, but no timeframes for the upgrade were given.

It comes after Samsung in January had unveiled its portfolio of S24 smartphones, and at that time revealed the handsets would include Google’s generative AI technology, which it called ‘Galaxy AI’.

Bixby AI

At this week’s Galaxy Unpacked event in Paris, Samsung had revealed enhancements to ‘Galaxy AI’ in its devices, that included an expansion of its wearable portfolio.

Bixby had been launched back in 2017 with Samsung’s Galaxy S8 smartphone, and rivals Apple’s Siri.

The Samsung voice assistant offered a number of functions, including live translations or restaurant recommendations.

The Bixby Vision tool also allows a person to use their phone camera to scan whatever is in front of them and then Bixby will offer up information about it.

But now it has been confirmed that the venerable Bixby voice assistant will be launched with AI capabilities this year.

TM Roh told CNBC that the company will be unveiling a further upgraded Bixby this year that uses the South Korean technology giant’s own large language model (LLM).

“We’re going to advance Bixby with application of Gen AI technology,” Roh reportedly said in Korean via a translator.

Samsung will maintain its strategy of allowing multiple voice assistants on its devices, Roh reportedly said. For example, Google’s own AI assistant is available on Samsung’s latest devices.

Apple move

Roh’s confirmation of its Bixby upgrade comes after Apple in June had announced its assistant Siri will be getting an AI upgrade thanks to Apple’s partnership with ChatGPT owner OpenAI.

Some will consider the upgrade of both Samsung’s and Apple’s voice assistants with AI capabilities as long overdue.

Siri, Bixby and even Amazon’s Alexa (which is also rumoured to be getting an AI upgrade) are typically seen as less conversational and have relied on users asking questions and getting answers.

In February 2023 Samsung updated Bixby with enhanced language recognition, as well as the Bixby Custom Voice Creator, where users can record different sentences for Bixby to analyse and create an AI generated copy of their voice and tone.

Despite all this, AI chatbots in the past couple of years have leapfrogged personal voice assistants in terms of functionality, and are more advanced, and able to handle much more complex queries.