Samsung has reportedly started rolling out the Bixby Voice update for global markets. The update first made available in South Korea and the United States is said to be rolling out to the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ users in the UK, Netherlands, India, Germany and South Africa.
Samsung had announced Bixby as its competitor to digital assistants like the Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and others during the launch of Galaxy S8 in March. The feature, however, did not get voice support at the time of its availability in April. Sammobile reports that Galaxy S8 users are getting updates to a bunch of Bixby apps including Bixby, Bixby PLM, Bixby Wake up, Bixby Dictation and Bixby Global Action.
The report adds that Samsung is only rolling out the update for now but it yet to enable the feature on server level for these regions. Samsung confirmed to one user in the UK that Bixby's voice isn't available in the region at this point in time.
Samsung is preparing to launch the Galaxy Note8 smartphone on August 23 and it is expected to announce further updates for the Bixby voice assistant at the launch event. The global updates may well be a method to prepare the devices for the availability of Bixby. The company might toggle the server-side switch for the above-mentioned regions post the Note8 launch.
Bixby was touted to be the major feature of Samsung's Galaxy S8 and the future smartphones from the company. The assistant, however, is yet to prove its mettle against similar offerings and the Korean smartphone is also not being proactive about the updates coming to the assistant and its global rollout.