Samsung S8 Bixby Won’t Answer Your Voice Commands This April

Counting the days until April 21st? Having the prettiest smartphone on the market in your pocket can make anyone giddy. Frankly, we don’t want to spoil your fun but here’s the thing – Bixby won’t answer your voice commands on the spot. Samsung’s virtual assistant will lack a couple of features upon launch #mobilemagic

The South Korean manufacturer told BBC  some customers are not going to be able to talk with Bixby on April 21st. In fact, a month may pass until Samsung’s assistant is going to be able to understand and respond to voice commands in English. It seems that Samsung hasn’t perfected Bixby’s understanding of the language yet. Only customers in South Korea are going to benefit from the full package.

Internationally, Bixby will be present in April, on Samsung S8 and S8 Plus, with Home, Reminder and Vision functions. If those controls aren’t enough to attract and retain customers’ attention, then Samsung could face another failure. Think about it: what would anyone do if their primary virtual assistant couldn’t interact with them? Switch to the secondary one, right?

If users decide to remap the Bixby physical button in order to trigger Google Assistant, then Samsung is going to face a huge risk – that of being forgotten. After last year’s fiasco with Note 7, that’s a luxury Samsung can’t afford.

Let’s just hope they’re better teachers then we give them credit for and Bixby learns English faster than predicted (May 2017).

What do you think – is this delay enough to make you reconsider buying the device or switching to Google Assistant?