Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 Ultra.
Samsung has been searching for a way to make its in-house AI, Bixby, useful again. The launch of the Galaxy S25 may have done just that.
At a Samsung event in London last week, executives demoed the company’s new take on AI assistants. The headline news is that Gemini has effectively replaced Bixby as the default Galaxy phone AI, even kicking the latter out of the quick-launch home button.
Bixby has seemingly been relegated. Except, it hasn’t, according to Samsung executives I quizzed last week. Rather than exclusively focussing on generative abilities, the newly revamped Bixby has been repurposed for navigating through Samsung phones.
The idea appears to be that Bixby will be able to complete most tasks on a Galaxy S25 with natural language requests. “Anything that can be done by touch can be done [with your voice] by Bixby,” Lee Dinham, mobile experience product specialist at Samsung told me.
It couldn’t be demoed at the time, so we will have to wait until my review unit arrives before I can properly test it. But Samsung executives claim that any and all settings can be changed—or found—with a spoken request to Bixby. Executives were more coy about the extent of Bixby’s control over the Galaxy S25, not answering questions about if it can make edits to a picture with spoken requests, for example.
But if Bixby can navigate through a Galaxy phone and complete any request, then that is a serious new skill for Samsung phones that doesn’t exist on rival Apple and Google devices.
Imagine asking Bixby to make minute edits to pictures with a sentence, share media to different apps and contacts, create side-by-side of apps when multitasking on foldables, or installing and uninstalling apps.
Solving an old Samsung Galaxy phone problem
Samsung phones can do a lot. But how many Galaxy owners are aware of the depth of customization options available to them? How many people know about audio isolation when recording a video? Alarm clock animations? Speech enhancement on a phone call? Wallpaper that reacts to your real-world weather? Separate app sounds?
Who has the time or inclination to discover and learn these features? If Bixby can be the bridge to uncharted phone-feature waters, then that will solve a long-term issue for these devices: feature bloat. Two years ago I wrote about how this was a growing problem.
“Innovative features are obviously, ultimately, a good thing. They are the culmination of years of feature development and software refinement. It’s not just Samsung that struggles with this, it applies to most smartphone manufacturers but Samsung has long been the industry’s de facto innovator (remember the Galaxy S5’s “smart pause” trick that paused videos if you looked away from the screen?).
“Because of that, Samsung phones do feel heavy with features and laden with possibilities that will never be explored by most users.”
That story was about Samsung’s generative AI model, Gauss, and how it could be deployed in the future. Two years on and it appears that solving feature bloat has long been on the minds of Samsung’s designers.
Dinham told me that Google’s Gemini is still the primary assistant on Samsung phones because the company is “ahead of the game” and that Bixby plays a different AI role on Galaxy devices.
Bixby’s return with this new narrow remit was very much secondary information that execs only revealed in interviews. I get it; using AI to navigate around increasingly complex operating systems isn’t as sexy as using generative AI to turn your dog into Batman.
To me, though, this is one of the more consequential new features Samsung has released in recent years. It will fundamentally impact how people use their phones day-to-day. That is, of course, if it works. Having done this job for longer than I care to admit, I know about the difference between tech company promises and the more pedestrian reality. We will know more once I get a chance to put the Samsung Galaxy S25 through my review machine.