Samsung Galaxy S8’s release is just round the corner. And this time Samsung has tried to bring in all the features it has to offer in this flagship smartphone. For this, the company has even done its homework right. Samsung acquired Viv Labs in October 2016, the company originally behind Apple’s Siri assistant. And it came up with its own AI Voice Assistant Bixby for which it has dedicated a separate button on the left side of Galaxy S8.

This report, about Samsung assigning Bixby its own button on Galaxy S8, may not be a new one. But the catch here is that the ‘button will be used for Bixby in the long run’ as per a new report. From this it can be inferred that Bixby, the AI assistant on Galaxy S8 will not be operational with the launch of Galaxy S8 by March-end or even in the early days of the launch of the device.

ETnews quoted a Korean telecom carrier official as saying, “A new button has been added on the left side of the device. The button will be used for Bixby in the long run.”

Read: Samsung Galaxy S8 colors and pricing revealed!

The official further stated, “The Galaxy S8 has one volume control button unlike the previous two. The Bixby button will be located below the volume button.”

It seems there are still some developmental work left which are currently under process. Owing to this, the Bixby functions would not be available during the early days of the phone’s launch but would surely make its way within the first half of this year. The development work cited by Etnews is probably to enable Bixby to support multi languages.

Read: Galaxy S8 Voice assistant ‘Bixby’ to support 7-8 languages

Clearly, Samsung is working to create an AI assistant which will have an edge over other existent AI’s viz Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. By making Bixby support multi-languages, Samsung has set its eyes on targeting the global market.

via The Investor