Samsung’s bringing back Bixby with new AI superpowers

Samsung's AI adventures seemed to have sidelined Bixby, its personal digital assistant. But the firm says a smarter, chatbot-based Bixby will arrive later this year.

In recent months Samsung seems to have been playing a game of Where's Wally, but with Bixby in the iconic striped jumper. We've had AI announcement after AI announcement but again and again, Samsung's personal digital assistant hasn't been invited along. But Bixby hasn't been retired to hang out with Microsoft Clippy, Jeeves of Ask Jeeves or Microsoft Bob. Samsung says Bixby will be coming back with new AI powers.

That's good news and a bit of a surprise, because when Samsung launched the Samsung Galaxy S24 range in January it seemed that the policy towards Bixby was not to remove it, but not to do anything new with it either. But in a new interview with the CNBC news network, Samsung's mobile boss TM Roh promised that "we’re going to advance Bixby with application of Gen AI technology".

Roh didn't go into a lot more detail, but the upgraded Bixby is scheduled for launch later this year and will use Samsung's own large language model (LLM).

Like Apple's Siri, Samsung's Bixby is getting better

Bixby has been around since the Samsung Galaxy S8 way back in 2017, which is a long time ago in tech years. But Samsung's AI push has sidelined it, in much the same way that Google's AI chatbots have eclipsed the Google Assistant.

The first sign that that would change this year came in March, with another CNBC interview . Won-joon Choi, Samsung's executive VP of mobile, told the broadcaster that "With the emergence of generative AI and LLM (large language model) technology, I believe that we have to redefine the role of the Bixby, so that Bixby could be equipped with generative AI and become more smarter in the future."

That smarter Bixby, like Apple's smarter Siri, would be able to have more natural conversations and work across the entire product ecosystem. However that interview didn't talk timelines and as a result the changes didn't seem imminent. This new report suggests that the plans are much more concrete than that interview suggested and we'll see the bigger, better Bixby before the year is out.