Samaung revealed its plans to give Bixby a major AI overhaul in July earlier this year and it seems like that overhaul is ready for rollout, considering Samsung just launched the next-generation Bixby in China. The new Bixby debuted alongside the Samsung W25 and the W25 Flip in the country, which are China’s version of the Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition and the Galaxy Z Flip 6.
The new AI-powered Bixby will be available first on the Samsung W25 and W25 Flip in China. Samsung has highlighted four major new capabilities of the next-generation Bixby, starting with the ability to incorporate video into responses. For example, when requesting travel tips, Bixby can now add relevant videos to text replies.
Then, another new feature enables Bixby to translate entire web pages, making it easier for users to access information in different languages.
Then, Samsung notes that the new Bixby will also be able to make use of AI to understand “complex user intentions.” This means that the new generation of Bixby can capture and process multi-task instructions which the user might incorporate in a sentence. For instance, a user could say, “Turn on the vibration mode and tell me the schedule at 5 p.m. tomorrow,” and Bixby will be able to fulfill both these tasks.
The company notes that the new version will have improved contextual understanding of instructions and can also utilize on-screen content. Finally, one of the biggest new features of the next-generation Bixby is that it can intelligently generate PPT, Word and other document content according to the users’ needs to improve editing efficiency.
Samsung has truly introduced a worthy upgrade for Bixby and it actually needed one considering the AI assistant has long faced an existential crisis, especially in front of better assistants such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini. It’s unclear when this new Bixby would make its way to other markets outside China, but there’s a high possibility we could see it alongside the launch of One UI 7 early next year, or with the beta that’s expected to come later this month.