Even though Samsung promotes Google’s Gemini AI voice assistant on its latest smartphones, the company has revived Bixby, its in-house voice assistant, with deep web search capabilities powered by Perplexity. The new version will be available with the forthcoming One UI 8.5 software update.
The new, revamped Bixby can now understand conversational natural language. In other words, you can speak to the voice assistant as if you’re talking to a person, without taking unnatural pauses or sounding like a robot (via a 9To5Google report).
A smarter Bixby that understands you and your phone
“We redesigned Bixby to enable more natural interactions and intuitive device control,” Samsung wrote in the now-deleted newsroom post that announced the new Bixby AI assistant. In addition to the natural language understanding, the voice assistant can now access the device’s settings.
For instance, users should be able to invoke the assistant and ask that they don’t want the screen to time out while they’re still looking at it. In response, Bixby should redirect them to the “Keep Screen On While Viewing” option in the settings menu.
If Bixby can indeed access the device’s settings, it could be a significant quality-of-life improvement for users. Buyers will no longer have to wade through long support pages or YouTube videos to find certain features or options deep within the Settings app.
Thanks to the Perplexity integration, Bixby should also be able to handle multi-step tasks that involve browsing the internet. So, commands like “Find me the best restaurant for eating burgers in my locality” or “Find the best cafes for having coffee near my house” should return meaningful results rather than just a basic internet search.
Given that the new Bixby is said to launch with One UI 8.5, it should come out alongside the Galaxy S26 series, which is expected to break cover in late February and go on sale in the first half of March. For now, the AI-infused Bixby should be available as part of the fourth One UI 8.5 beta update (on eligible devices).
However, the deletion of the official newsroom post is a bit puzzling. Samsung might have pushed the post by mistake or earlier than planned, but for now, the company seems to have backtracked on its Bixby reboot. Even so, I’ll expect the next One UI 8.5 beta update to come with the AI-infused Bixby.
