By Shikhar Mehrotra
Publication Date: 2026-01-20 22:03:00
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.
