The Galaxy S8 comes with Samsung Bixby, Samsung’s competitor to Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. But as expected of highly anticipated products, a few weaknesses instantly noticeable. The brand new AI assistant, Bixby, has been reported to be giving its users some troubles and difficulty. Hopefully, this article can help you understand and troubleshoot some Samsung Bixby problems.
Troubleshooting Bixby Starts With The Name
For English speakers, “Bixby” is fairly easy to pronounce. It sounds like two common words: bigs and bee. However, for those without a native tongue in English, “Bixby” might be difficult to say. In countries like Korea and Japan, a cluster of three or more consonants isn’t common. Bixby (biksby) has a cluster of three consonants: k, s, and b. So in order for Korean and Japanese native speakers to pronounce Bixby, they would need to add an extra vowel which would make Bixby sound like “Bik-seu-bee,” and Bixby might not catch the slight interpretation of its name.
Samsung Bixby Can’t Hear
A lot of the first buyers of the Galaxy S8 were extremely anxious to try out Bixby, especially with the in-depth demos that were released online. Unfortunately, it’s not in its complete form yet, and that’s a real slap to the face. Samsung has held back on allowing the full functions of Bixby because they concluded that it is not yet ready. One of the features we have yet to try is voice activation. For now, the AI assistant cannot hear its users. Thankfully, there are a few Bixby gadgets that are available for utilization. But those aren’t enough to quench our thirst for Bixby at its fullest potential.
Inaccurate Samsung Bixby Vision
Bixby vision was a pretty cool concept as shown in demonstrations, but in reality, it isn’t all that great. The images that Bixby shares in comparison to the picture taken can often be unsimilar. Even brand-name products are sometimes difficult to recognize by Bixby. Not only is Bixby deaf, but perhaps it’s having some vision problems as well.
Samsung Bixby Translations
Instant text translation can be a pretty useful tool to have in the palm of your hand… if it worked. Bixby can, to some extent, recognize foreign text. But if it isn’t in a standard, easy-to-read font, it’ll just give up. Even if it can read the text, it utilizes Google Translate, and we all know that sometimes Google Translate doesn’t provide the most accurate translations.
Bixby button not working
An early update after the release of the S8 has prevented the Bixby button from working. The button is located just under the volume down key. Samsung has not allowed any remapping, rendering the button completely useless in any circumstance. The only way to access Bixby is to go to the home screen and swipe all the way to the left.
Fortunately, Samsung updated its OS once more, re-enabling the Bixby button. Unfortunately, it still cannot be reprogrammed to perform another function.
The waiting game
With all of these broken features, it was a bad move on Samsung to release Bixby in its current condition. At the moment, Bixby is nothing more than a renamed Google Assistant. What’s more surprising is that Google Assistant is still in the phone, as if Samsung knew Bixby wouldn’t be ready at launch. So now we have the tasks of one AI assistant split into two names, Bixby and Google Assistant.
The problems stated above are currently issues that can’t be fixed on our own. All we can do is wait for Samsung’s next move. It might be hard to support Samsung’s decisions at this point, but it’s even harder to go downhill from here.
A lot of Galaxy S8 users, myself included, are anxiously awaiting the full release of Bixby. Hopefully, we’ll get the full AI assistant we were anticipating, and not a partial update.