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Samsung's Bixby voice assistant is reportedly still weeks away from US launch

Samsung's Bixby voice assistant is reportedly still weeks away from US launch

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Samsung Galaxy S8
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

It looks like Samsung is going to miss its own deadline for launching Bixby’s voice features in the US. The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that the voice portion of Bixby, Samsung’s new digital assistant, won’t be ready until at least late June and that the software is still struggling to reliably understand English.

That means Bixby’s voice features will end up launching at the earliest sometime this summer — which starts June 21st — and after the “spring” target that Samsung gave in early April.

Bixby is supposed to be one of the flagship features on the Galaxy S8, which launched in the US just over a month ago. While it seems pretty safe to say that few are dying to get their hands on the full Bixby experience — it doesn’t look like a dramatic improvement over Siri or the other digital assistants we’ve seen in recent years — its absence is pretty noticeable. After all, Samsung dedicated an entire button on the S8 to launching Bixby. But with the assistant yet to launch, all the button does it pull up a Bixby app that aggregates info you might be interested in, much like Google Now.