Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+ Will Not Have Bixby Voice Assistant Out Of The Box

When Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ to the world, the company proudly shared that the Android devices will have their own voice assistant called Bxby. Unfortunately, consumers shouldn’t expect to get their hands on the new Siri rival as it was recently found out that Bixby will not ship with the flagship phones.

On Tuesday, CNET learned that the key feature that was supposed to debut when the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ start shipping at the end of the month will not come with the handsets. The South Korea giant has confirmed that its new voice assistant will not be operational out of the box, so consumers won’t be able to use it starting April 21.

Samsung said that while key features of Bixby will be functional at launch, the voice assistant will not be available for use until the later part of spring. “Key features of Bixby, including Vision, Home and Reminder, will be available with the global launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 on April 21. Bixby Voice will be available in the U.S. on the Galaxy S8 later this spring,” Samsung said in a statement.

READ: Samsung Bixby will come with third-party app support

It isn’t surprising that the voice assistant that will rival Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana is not debuting upon the global launch of the new Samsung flagship phones. Just late last month it was found out that Bixby was still in beta mode, with Samsung saying at the time that it was still working on completing the digital assistant.

Meanwhile, developers successfully deployed the Bixby voice assistant on older Galaxy handsets, such as he Galaxy S7, early this month. With the help of the Android Package Kit (APK) that was shared online by a developer, XDA-Developers members were able to install and use the Bixby’s software on their Samsung smartphones running Android 7.0 Nougat.