It has been almost three months since the launch of the Galaxy S8, and Samsung is finally ready to unleash an English-speaking version of Bixby on the world—well, on the US at least. Samsung announced today that its voice assistant can finally speak English, and it's rolling out to the Galaxy S8 and S8+ now. The UK, Australia, Canada, and other English-speaking nations still don't have Bixby, however.

When the Galaxy S8 was announced at the end of March, Bixby was a heavily promoted part of the phone. Samsung considered Bixby so core to the Galaxy S8 software package that Samsung actually added a hardware "Bixby" button to the side of the Galaxy S8—it looks just like a second power button and lives below the volume rocker. Bixby launched in Samsung's home of Korea along with the Galaxy S8, but integrating English proved too hard of a task for Bixby to master in time for the Galaxy S8's April US launch.

With no Bixby to use on their Bixby button, Galaxy S8 customers started remapping the button with third-party apps, turning it into a Blackberry-style "convenience key" that could be configured to launch anything. Samsung has been aggressively disabling these mods with software updates, insisting that the Bixby button is only to be used for Bixby.

Bixby seems like it can do all the usual assistant stuff, but Samsung has a few examples that sound more complicated than what you can do on Siri, the Google Assistant, or Alexa. With a single command, the press release claims you'll be able to "group pictures from your latest vacation and send them to your friends." Bixby Labs is another unique feature, which will let third-party apps opt in to the Bixby system, providing voice command capabilities. Google has actually signed up for this, giving Google Maps, Google Play Music, and YouTube some Bixby functionality. Facebook signed up, too. The future of Bixby also apparently includes life inside an Amazon Echo-style speaker if a report from the Wall Street Journal is to be believed.

With this rollout of Bixby in the US, it's now available in two countries: the US and South Korea. Samsung has a lot of work to do to make the assistant available in the 120 countries the Galaxy S8 will be sold in by the end of the year.

Once Bixby is updated and set up, users will be able to launch the voice assistant by holding down the hardware Bixby button or just by saying "Hi, Bixby." Holding down the button will also trigger an update and sign-up process, but that feature has not been rolled out to every Galaxy S8 just yet.