Owners of Samsung’s flagships - the Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note 8 - will now be able to use another voice assistant besides Google’s on their smartphones. Bixby, which so far was a page that could be triggered off by pressing a dedicated physical key on the left edge of the phone, is now called up in voice mode with a long press on that key.
Bixby is not meant to compete head-on with Google Assistant but rather to do additional and on-phone tasks which Samsung hopes will make getting things done faster and easier.
Bixby takes some initial setting up, requiring users to input their voice, reading commands and sentences and trying out a few tasks. Once done, Bixby Voice can be triggered even by saying “Hi Bixby” to a sleeping device.