It’s no secret that Bixby has slipped on Samsung’s list of priorities, but that could be about to change. We say “could be” because the South Korean outfit proudly confirmed the rollout of the “new” Bixby alongside the OneUI 8.5 update, before promptly deleting the announcement. It’s a good thing SamMobile was paying attention.
It’s unclear why Samsung nixed the announcement, but one thing is certain — Bixby is due for an upgrade. An AI-powered upgrade at that, which should lessen the company’s reliance on Google Gemini. That’s assuming it pulls off the overhaul without a hitch, which isn’t exactly in the playbook for Samsung’s on-device assistant.
Meet the ‘new’ Bixby
The biggest change involves turning Bixby into a more refined, natural-sounding assistant. In addition to speaking to users more conversationally, Bixby will also get better at understanding conversational language and deciphering context clues, resulting in fewer awkward pauses and repeating the same question multiple times.
With new conversational abilities comes new powers for Bixby. It won’t turn its nose up at simple on-device tasks, with Samsung’s example involving the user asking Bixby to keep the screen on while they’re looking at it. Instead of presenting a list of instructions, Bixby will take the initiative and change the setting itself.
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It won’t just sound smarter; Bixby will actually gain a few extra neurons thanks to the assistant being integrated with Perplexity, too. That’ll give it the drive it needs to perform real-time web searches to deal with a query live, all presented inside the Bixby UI rather than a separate browser app.
There’s no telling when the OneUI 8.5 update and, by extension, the Bixby overhaul will go live. It’ll arrive in beta form first — possibly the fourth build, according to SamMobile. Even so, we guess the public OneUI 8.5 rollout will take place sooner rather than later if Samsung has the press release all typed up and ready to ship.
