Bixby Vision Shopping Feature Now Live On Galaxy S8 With Verizon’s Latest Update

Verizon has started rolling out a software update that enables the Amazon shopping capability of Bixby Vision on Samsung’s Galaxy S8 flagship phone and its big brother, the Galaxy S8+. With this feature, users can use their smartphone camera to get links to purchase items they see in real life directly from the Amazon store.

On Wednesday, SamMobile learned from Verizon that it is rolling out a software update to enable the Amazon shopping feature of Bixby Vision. The update, which has the build number NRD90M.G955USQU1AQD9, will activate the shopping capability of the image recognition technology to work with the Galaxy S8’s camera. Thus, users can just point their smartphone camera to an object to get the link to shop the same item on Amazon. This makes it easier for consumers to do their online shopping without having to scroll through pages or search for items on the Amazon store.

The new software update, which comes with the April 1, 2017 security patch, is slowly rolling out, so users should not worry if Verizon’s support page for the Galaxy S8 still shows software version NRD90M.G950USQU1AQD9 as the latest version on their end. The update will most likely complete its rollout in a couple of days.

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When Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ during its Unpacked event last March, it also proudly announced Bixby as the powerful AI assistant of the two flagship smartphones. Unfortunately, many features of Bixby were not ready at launch. Consumers in the United States even have to wait for a while until they could finally give voice commands to the new smart assistant.

One of the main features of Bixby is Bixby Vision. It is an image recognition technology that’s designed to identify texts, recognize objects and even provide shopping links to certain items that are also found on the Amazon store. Some aspects of Bixby Vision were not available at launch for Verizon customers, so they weren’t able to use it for online shopping. It’s a good thing then that the carrier is rolling out a new update that unlocks the full potential of the image recognition feature.

Meanwhile, Samsung has already announced the May security patch for its Galaxy smartphones. The South Korea tech giant took to its Security Blog to reveal the contents of this month’s patch. As indicated in the new blog entry, the maintenance update comes with fixes for 54 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) in the Android OS as well as 11 Samsung Vulnerabilities and Exposures (SVE) patches to improve the security on Samsung Mobile devices.

Also noticeable in the blog post is Samsung’s decision to mark the status of most of the patches as “privately disclosed.” In a separate report, SamMobile explained that Apple’s biggest rival did this so as not to give details that could expose bugs that hackers have not yet discovered. Not disclosing specific details also prevents any attempts of exploiting bugs before the firmware is completely rolled out to all eligible devices. Nevertheless, it is stated in the blog post that the new security patch addresses the vulnerability that enables unauthorized processes to reset the configuration of various apps, it fixes the problem with the log files that can be leaked when devices are rebooted and it resolves many other issues.