Samsung’s Siri rival finally gets its voice in the U.S. next month

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Bixby
Bixby Voice is on its way.
Photo: Samsung

Bixby, Samsung’s latest competitor to Siri, will finally find its voice in the U.S. next month.

A leaked internal email reveals Bixby Voice will make its official debut before the end of August. Until now, the feature has only been available in Samsung’s home country of South Korea.

When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S8 series, it placed great focus on Bixby, the virtual assistant that does more than just answer your questions. In many ways, it’s more intelligent than Siri, but it’s been a huge disappoint to most Galaxy S8 owners.

That’s because Bixby is yet to get a voice in countries outside of South Korea. It can be used for certain things, but its best features simply aren’t available yet. Samsung promised they would arrive in the spring, but we’re well into summer now, and nothing’s changed.

But it will next month, according to an internal email spotted by SamMobile. Bixby will finally find its voice in the U.S. on Tuesday, August 18 — at which point you’ll be able to control it using voice commands, and get spoken feedback for your requests.

Samsung has blamed the delay on a lack of “big data,” and the fact that it has engineers working on this in the U.S. and South Korea, who struggle to share information due to the language barrier. It’s incredibly difficult to teach a virtual assistant new languages.

When Bixby Voice finally makes its debut, we’ll find out whether it really is better than Siri, and other rivals like Amazon Alexa, the Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. It certainly promises impressive features, but they’re useless if it can’t understand us.

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