Samsung Finally Gets Serious About Bixby — But Is It Too Late?

Samsung just did something nobody expected: it made Bixby interesting. The company announced today that its long-suffering AI assistant has been rebuilt from the ground up as part of the One UI 8.5 beta program. The new Bixby isn't just a voice command layer anymore — Samsung's calling it a "conversational device agent," and the upgrade is the clearest signal yet that the company is done treating its assistant as an afterthought. The beta is rolling out now to Galaxy S25 series owners in six markets: the U.S., UK, Germany, India, Korea, and Poland. It's a limited start, but the ambitions behind it aren't. ## What Actually Changed The old Bixby was, to put it charitably, painful. You had to know exact setting names, memorize command structures, and pray that it understood your accent. It felt like talking to a phone menu from 2014. The new version takes a fundamentally different approach. Samsung has rebuilt Bixby around natural language understanding, meaning you can describe what you want in plain English — or eleven other supported languages — without knowing how Samsung's menus are organized. The example Samsung gave in its press release is telling: a user says, "I don't want the screen to time out while I'm still looking at it." Old Bixby would've stared blankly. New Bixby finds the "Keep Screen on While Viewing" toggle and flips it. That's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that separates an assistant people actually use from one they disable on day one. More impressively, Bixby can now diagnose problems contextually. If you ask "Why is my phone screen always on inside my pocket?" it won't just shrug — it'll identify that Accidental Touch Protection is off and offer to turn it on. This is genuinely useful troubleshooting behavior, not just a search box with a microphone. Samsung also added real-time web search directly inside Bixby's interface. You can ask it to find hotels in Seoul with kids' pools, and it'll pull results without bouncing you to a browser tab. It's not groundbreaking in isolation — Google's been doing this for ages — but the fact that it stays within Bixby's own UI is a meaningful design choice. Samsung wants you to think of Bixby as the front door to your phone, not a shortcut to Chrome. ## The Galaxy AI Strategy Takes Shape This Bixby overhaul doesn't exist in a vacuum. Samsung has been building toward what it calls "Galaxy AI" since the Galaxy S24 launch in January 2024, and the strategy is becoming clearer with each release. One UI 8.5 also brings upgraded Photo Assist, smarter Quick Share that recognizes faces in your photos and suggests sending them to those contacts, and Storage Share for browsing files across Galaxy devices. The whole update reinforces Samsung's bet that AI shouldn't live in a single chatbot window — it should be woven into the device at every level. Bixby is the conversational thread tying it all together. It's a solid strategy on paper. The problem is execution. ## The Competitive Landscape Is Brutal Here's where things get uncomfortable for Samsung. The AI assistant race has changed dramatically since 2024, and Bixby is entering a fight where the other contenders have had significant head starts. Apple Intelligence shipped with iOS 18 and has been expanding ever since. Siri's integration with on-device AI models gives it something Samsung can't easily match: privacy-first processing that happens locally. Apple's approach is less flashy than what Samsung or Google are doing, but it's deeply embedded into the iPhone experience in ways that feel invisible. When Siri rewrites your email or summarizes your notifications, it doesn't feel like you're using an "AI feature." It feels like your phone just got smarter. Google, meanwhile, has gone all-in on Gemini as the replacement for Google Assistant. Gemini lives inside Android, inside Chrome, inside Gmail, inside every Google product that matters. Its contextual understanding is months — if not years — ahead of what Samsung showed today. Google's advantage isn't just the model quality; it's the data flywheel. Every query, every interaction across billions of users feeds back into making Gemini better. And here's the awkward part: Samsung phones run Android. Galaxy devices already have access to Gemini. So Samsung isn't just competing with Google — it's competing with a company whose software already runs on Samsung's own hardware. Every time a Galaxy user opens Gemini instead of Bixby, Samsung loses a little more relevance in its own landscape. ## The Real Question Samsung's COO Won-Joon Choi framed today's announcement around accessibility — making AI easier for more people. "We decided to integrate a device agent directly into the experience," he said, positioning Bixby as something that reduces friction rather than adds features. That's the right framing, honestly. Samsung's path to relevance in AI assistants isn't going to be through building the most powerful model. It doesn't have Google's data advantage or Apple's hardware-software lock-in. What it does have is roughly 270 million smartphones shipped annually, a massive landscape of TVs and appliances (Bixby already got an AI upgrade on Samsung TVs last summer), and a user base that skews toward people who don't want to think about which AI assistant to use. If Samsung can make Bixby the thing that just works when you talk to your Galaxy phone — not the most capable assistant, but the most helpful one for everyday Samsung device tasks — that's a legitimate niche. Device management, settings navigation, cross-device file sharing, appliance control through SmartThings. These aren't sexy, but they're practical. The beta is limited to the Galaxy S25 series for now, with broader expansion coming later. Samsung hasn't announced a timeline for the full release, but if the beta follows the same cadence as previous One UI cycles, expect a stable rollout alongside new hardware later this year. The new Bixby is, by all appearances, a massive improvement over what came before. But "massive improvement over Bixby" is a low bar. The real test is whether Samsung can convince Galaxy owners to talk to Bixby instead of Gemini — and that's a much harder sell.