Bixby—Samsung's voice assistant designed to take on Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google's Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana—has finally been released. Its launch has already been a bumpy one—Bixby was supposed to launch three months ago with the Galaxy S8, and while that happened in Korea, getting Bixby to master English has resulted in delay after delay.

Normally, late software wouldn't be a huge deal for the Galaxy S8 launch, but Samsung felt so strongly about pairing Bixby with the Galaxy S8 that it built a hardware button onto the device specifically for Bixby. During the long delay, S8 customers created apps that turned the Bixby button into a general-purpose "convenience" key—a button users can configure themselves. But Samsung didn't like this. The company pushed out a series of updates designed to disable apps that changed the Bixby button and earned a good deal of ire from customers.

With the pre-release drama out of the way, Bixby is finally here. If you have a Galaxy S8, you can ask Bixby questions and tell it to do things, and sometimes you'll even get a useful response. Like we wrote in our Galaxy S8 review, Bixby is an odd sell for a Samsung owner, since—like all Android phones—the device already comes with the Google Assistant. So like most of Samsung's Android pack-in apps, Bixby is a duplicated service that is chasing an existing Google offering. Also like most of Samsung's software offerings, it's a half-baked solution that doesn't work very well.

Training Trouble





Like most voice systems, Bixby requires a bit of training when it starts up. First comes the hotword training, which works a lot like Google's. You say "Hi Bixby" a few times, and the app records your voice. So far, so good.

Next is something a little different. You're asked to train Bixby by reading a few canned sentences, which is more like an old-school voice-dictation program than these cloud-based assistants. When I did it, the page instructed me to read the first sentence, which is "Health is always important." Once I was done reading it to Bixby, the logo animated into a spinner animation while Bixby processed my speech. This thinking went on for about 20 seconds before the app told me "Bixby couldn't understand you. Tap the Bixby logo to try again."

I tried about 40 more times—"Health is always important"—each with an agonizing 15 to 20 second wait while Bixby processed my speech input and told me it couldn't understand me. I tried speaking in a casual tone, then in a robotic, heavily enunciated speaking manner. I tried with the phone "6-12 inches away from my face" as the previous screen instructed, and I tried holding the phone to my face. I rebooted the phone a few times and started setup again. I tried speaking at quiet, medium, and loud volumes. I tried in the quietest room in the house. I blasted the microphones with canned air to make sure they weren't clogged. Bixby never accepted my input. To make sure the phone wasn't broken, I fired up Google and told it: "Health is always important." Sure enough, it worked fine.

So, since training wasn't working, I hit the skip button. The settings said this means I'll be using regular voice recognition instead of "enhanced" voice recognition. I realized this will probably hurt Bixby's voice performance, but there's nothing I could do about it. Training just didn't work for me, and this is despite being born in the US, not having a heavy accent, and never having a problem with other voice-recognition systems.

The Basics















Samsung has most of the basics down with Bixby. The "Hi Bixby" hotword is always on, meaning it works when the screen is off. It also works with a lock screen set—non-personal queries like "What time is it?" will work without unlocking, while queries that involve personal results like "Show me my pictures" will say "Actually, first we have to unlock the phone" and then the results will display after passing the unlock challenge. You can also set a "voice password," which will allow you to unlock the phone with a "secret" phrase. It's only going to stay a secret if no one is in earshot, though.

With Bixby voice, that hardware Bixby button on the Galaxy S8 finally becomes useful. A tap will launch Bixby's contextual card UI (a Google Now clone), while holding the button down will launch Bixby's voice UI. One surprise is that, for voice commands, the button uses "hold to talk" functionality rather than a simple listening trigger. You hold the button down for the entirety of your command and release it when you're finished speaking. This takes some time to get used to, but it does mean that you can make a really long query or stop and think in the middle of a query, and, while using the button, the voice recognition will never cut you off.

Bixby has both a compact "pop up" interface and a full-screen interface. The full-screen interface looks exactly like Siri, with a glassy background and answers on frosted cards. This will pop up for factual Q&A, joke answers, weather queries, and other internal Bixby things. The pop-up interface reminds me of Clippy, with the Bixby logo overlay shooting out chat bubbles, animating in response to queries, and hanging out for a bit after a query is finished. The pop-up interface is used when Bixby is controlling another app, like sending a text or starting a timer.

Bixby can answer questions that have definitive answers, like "Who is the president?" Bixby says this feature is "powered by Google," but it can't answer all of the questions Google Assistant can. For instance, any query that leverages Google Maps data, like questions about store hours or drive times, doesn't work. Also unlike the Assistant, every query to Bixby is an individual result instead of an ongoing, contextual conversation. This means that after asking "Who is the president?" and getting "Donald Trump," you can't use pronouns and ask "How old is he?" the way you can with the Google Assistant.

Being from hardware company Samsung, Bixby is great at controlling your phone's hardware and Samsung's pack-in Android apps. You can send text messages with Samsung's texting app, open websites in Samsung's browser, and take notes in Samsung's note app. You can also do all sorts of hardware things—control the volume, lower the screen brightness, and even do absurdly rare things like change the system language. Generally, in a Samsung app, Bixby can press individual buttons on the screen, allowing you to navigate from screen to screen using only your voice. You can say "Hi Bixby, open the settings," then "Hi Bixby, open display," then "Hi Bixby, open screen mode." While this is slow and wordy, Bixby will tap on just about anything inside a Samsung app. This doesn't seem to work for non-Samsung apps.

Bixby does not support changing the default apps away from Samsung's versions. For instance, if you change the default texting app from Samsung's built-in app to Google's "Android Messages" and then try to send a text, Bixby will say it can help you only after you've set Samsung's app as the default again. Bixby doesn't respect the default browser listed in Settings -> Apps -> Default apps—it always opens the Samsung browser, unless you verbally specify an alternate browser with every command, like "Open Arstechnica.com in Chrome." Links in Bixby's interface never respect the default browser setting, and they always use Samsung.

Samsung seems to understand how important other apps are with the third-party "Bixby Labs" program. Many of the apps I want to use are in the Labs program, but, unfortunately, they just don't work. Sending commands to Google Maps, Google Music, and YouTube all respond with "looks like we're experiencing some slight hiccups." The apps open, but Bixby is unable to navigate past the main screen.

While using Bixby, the voice recognition was a constant source of frustration. The "Hi Bixby" wake system often missed the first word of a command, and this was even with pausing and waiting for the UI to pop up. The UI would appear and the phone would beep, which I took to mean "Bixby is ready to listen." But often that just wasn't the case for me. Bixby's voice recognition just can't consistently pick up the first few words of a command, despite the phone indicating it is ready.

The transcription constantly gets words wrong and makes contextual mistakes that a smart system seems like it should catch. Bixby's transcription will often flub words that share a pronunciation, like "they're," "there," and "their." It also has trouble recognizing commands that should be obvious from the context. For instance, a baked-in Bixby command is "open Q&A" to get a question and answer interface, and it sometimes recognizes my verbal command as "Open q and j" and does nothing. I've also had "Open Dropbox" get registered as "Bin Dropbox."

Samsung also tries to "gamify" Bixby usage with an annoying "experience" system. Many times when you use Bixby you'll get a pop-up showing how much XP that function gains on Bixby's XP bar. Some of these are temporary pop-ups, which are annoying, and some are pop-ups that require tapping on them to dismiss them, which is really annoying. They always get in the way when you're just trying to do something on your phone.

It’s all about the ecosystem

I think a secret to voice assistants is that the capabilities and recognition accuracy don't matter as much as you might think. People don't pick a voice assistant based on which is more accurate—they pick one based on which ecosystem it plugs into.

If you ask a voice assistant to make a calendar event, or create a reminder, or take a note, that data goes somewhere, and where it goes matters more than the occasional incorrectly recognized word or unavailable function. Ask Siri to make a reminder, and it will be saved in iOS' reminders app, pushed up to iCloud, and synced back down to all your other iOS and MacOS devices, along with the iCloud Web interface. Ask the Google Assistant to make a reminder, and it will be saved in the Google cloud, where you can access it from the Google app, Google Inbox, and Google Calendar Android, Chrome OS, iOS, and the Web. Ask Bixby to make a reminder and it goes... in Samsung's reminder app. And nowhere else.

I'm using the reminders functionality as an example, but it is generally representative of every function that requires Bixby to store some information somewhere. Samsung has a single app on the Galaxy S8 that will store that data, and there's no way to access this information on other devices. The one exception to this is "add a calendar event," which, ironically, gets synced to Google Calendar.

A huge appeal of Google's and Apple's assistants are the established ecosystems. The data usually goes somewhere useful, and it's usually accessible on all your devices. Google and Apple assistants both work on (or have concrete plans to work on) watches, phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, cars, TVs, and standalone speakers. Google and Apple are both working on totally filling out that list with options, but both are far more available than Bixby, which only works on the Galaxy S8. We keep hearing rumors that say Samsung may or may not release a Bixby speaker and Bixby earbuds. But, for now, it's a very limited assistant.

Having the Google Assistant or Siri voice commands everywhere, with the entered data available across your devices, makes both of them much more useful tools than a limited, single-device assistant. It doesn't really matter how good or bad Bixby's voice recognition and abilities are if the data doesn't go anywhere. Samsung hasn't shown the ability or desire to build good Web portal, cross-platform apps. The company doesn't seem interested in connecting its range of devices or doing the third-party app outreach needed to compete with Siri or the Google Assistant. Who wants a voice assistant that is trapped in a single box?

When you have the option of the Google Assistant, why bother?

Picking a voice assistant is very personal. It mostly has to do with what devices and ecosystems you are already plugged into, so there's no one answer for everything. Since the Galaxy S8 already has the Google Assistant, Bixby is in direct competition with it, and, well, it's just no contest. In side-by-side testing, the Google Assistant was always faster than Bixby at returning results. The Google Assistant is available on more devices, it has more third-party integrations, and your data is accessible across Google's ecosystem on smart devices and the Web.

These assistants have a million functions, but I think most people have a few "most-used commands" that they stick to. Again, this is a very personal thing, but for me, Bixby is terrible at most of my favorite commands. Reminders are a favorite of mine, but they're stuck in the phone and don't go to the Web or my calendar. Another favorite is building a shopping list, which Bixby doesn't support at all. I use "Navigate to" in Google Maps a ton, and while that is a Bixby Labs feature, it never worked for me. I have a Smart Things setup that can control my house lights, but that doesn't work on Bixby. Timers, alarms, and weather queries work well, though.

On the S8, the only useful advantage Bixby has over the Google Assistant is always-on hotword support, but only because Samsung purposefully limited the Google Assistant. On many phones the "OK Google" hotword works all the time, but on the S8 it only works when the screen is on. Presumably, like the hardware button, this was done to promote Bixby. But, really, it just ends up hurting consumers.

In general, Bixby seems broken and unfinished. I couldn't complete the training, most of the Labs features don't work, voice recognition is frustratingly inaccurate, and many times the hotword voice pickup would drop the first few words of a query. Voice assistants are only useful when they are fast and reliable, since, remember, you can always do all of this with your fingers. Bixby's functionality gaps, voice recognition problems, lack of data sync, and general unreliability make it not worth using.

Listing image by Samsung