Bixby Voice goes live in South Korea

Samsung's exciting new flagship Galaxy S8 duo has been official for a little over a month now and the collective excitement is still running high. And the phenomenal interest and the strong pre-order sales were achieved in the absence of Bixby Voice - a huge part of Samsung's marketing pitch.

Bixby's eagerly-anticipated verbal abilities have been the subject to quite a few speculations since. Now Samsung has finally begun the feature rollout and its local market is naturally the first in line.

Demo videos, showing Bixby Voice at work have already started popping up on YouTube. Sadly, our Korean is a little rusty, but going by the first clip, we can see Bixby handles basic features, like running web searches and opening apps and menus with ease.

Still, that level of functionality was always a given, since even the older S Voice did a pretty good job in this department. What Samsung promised this time around is a much deeper level of integration of voice into the OS. The ultimate goal was for Bixby to navigate your S8 entirely through voice. This second clip seems to showcase some of those aspects.

We can clearly see that navigating menus and options through Bixby Voice is easily achievable. Also things like scrolling through lists and clicking on items. Of course, it is still early to comment on the usefulness of such features.

Bixby is expected to learn English and start popping up on US handsets "later this spring". Seeing how the Korean giant is treading in deep AI and voice recognition waters this time around, there is still plenty of time for hiccups. However, we remain hopeful that Samsung is really on to something. Otherwise, it might have to change its stance on Bixby button remapping yet again to soothe fans.

Thanks for the tip Dayne Campbell

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