All About Samsung Bixby’s Gen AI-Infused Future

Galaxy AI is right now at the core of Samsung’s mobile device ecosystem but there’s a key figure missing from the action – Samsung Bixby assistant.

What happened to Bixby? Where has it gone? Has it faced the axe?

For the uninitiated, Bixby was supposed to be Samsung’s answer to the mighty Google Assistant. It was a big deal on Samsung phones and other ecosystem products, promising a much smarter experience for its users. It was so crucial that Samsung decided to give it its native trigger button on the high-end Galaxy smartphones.

Samsung even planned to give Bixby its own smart speaker!

And now, Bixby is nowhere to be seen or heard from. Samsung’s recent Galaxy Unpacked 2024 events haven’t uttered anything on Bixby, especially since the Galaxy AI fever caught on with the South Koreans.

But for the few who knew or cared about Samsung’s smart voice assistant, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Here is everything we know about Samsung’s Bixby and its future in a world dominated by generative AI.

Is Samsung Bixby still alive?

Contrary to popular belief, Bixby is still present on most of the Galaxy S, Galaxy Z and Galayx A series smartphones. Unlike the previous years when Samsung loved to shove Bixby down your throat, the newer versions of One UI don’t bring it up as often.

But Bixby is still present on your Samsung Galaxy devices and is hidden deep within the Settings menu. If enabled, it might offer a better voice assistant experience than Google’s Assistant and the newly introduced Gemini. Bixby has a tighter integration with the One UI interface, thereby allowing it to perform basic on-device tasks. Prior to the Gen-AI hype, Samsung continued giving Bixby all the features that debuted earlier on Google Assistant.

When it comes to web searches though, Bixby isn’t as smart as other digital assistants in the market today. That’s where Samsung Mobile Division President TM Roh wants the assistant to improve.

Samsung Bixby features to get a booster dose of AI

On the sidelines of the Galaxy Unpacked event, which showcased the newly released Galaxy Z Flip 6, Galaxy Z Fold 6, the Galaxy Watch 7 series and the Galaxy Ring, Roh has shed light on Samsung’s future plans with the forgotten Bixby assistant.

In a statement to CNBC, Roh said that Bixby will get a shot of generative AI to make it more advanced and useful. Unlike the current crop of Galaxy AI features, which are based on Google’s Gemini AI model, the revised version of Bixby will be based on Samsung’s proprietary Large Language Models. Roh affirmed that the AI-enriched Bixby is scheduled to be on the market later this year.

Hence, there’s a possibility that the next-gen iteration of Bixby could debut with the upcoming One UI 7 based on Android 15, which is also coming later this year.

With a custom LLM under the hood, Bixby could make itself more useful than it is currently, as far as complex queries and web searches are concerned. Given Google’s strong partnership with Samsung over the development of Android in recent years, Samsung could train its LLM on Google’s vast bank of public data and gain an advancement over Apple Intelligence.

A standalone Bixby app for non-Samsung Android devices could not only help Samsung train its AI model with a larger sample size but also encourage more consumers to get into the Samsung ecosystem.

Could there be a Bixby app on iOS? We aren’t ruling out the possibility considering Samsung’s obsession with convincing iPhone users to switch to the feature-rich Galaxy devices and its ecosystem of products.

What remains to be seen is whether the Galaxy AI suite will ditch Gemini AI in favour of Samsung’s LLM to power its advanced set of productivity features.

(Hero and Featured Image Credits: Courtesy Samsung)