Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 Ultra.
Samsung has been looking 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 demonstrated the company’s new take on AI assistants. The big news is that Gemini has effectively replaced Bixby as the Galaxy phone’s default AI, even excluding the latter from the main quick launch button.
Bixby has apparently fallen out of the league. Except, it hasn’t, according to Samsung executives I asked last week. Instead of focusing exclusively on generating capabilities, the newly revamped Bixby has been repurposed to navigate Samsung phones.
The idea seems to be that Bixby will be able to perform most tasks on a Galaxy S25 with natural language prompts. “Anything that can be done by touch can be done [with your voice] by Bixby,” Lee Dinham, Samsung’s mobile experience product specialist, told me.
It couldn’t be demoed at the time, so we’ll have to wait until my review unit arrives before I can test it properly. But Samsung executives claim that 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 whether it can make edits to a photo with spoken requests, for example.
But if Bixby can navigate through a Galaxy phone and fulfill every request, then it’s a serious new capability for Samsung phones that doesn’t exist on rival Apple and Google devices.
Imagine asking Bixby to make minute photo edits with one sentence, share media with different apps and contacts, create apps side-by-side when multitasking on a foldable device or installing and uninstalling apps.
Solving an old Samsung Galaxy phone problem
Samsung phones can do 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? Improving speech on a phone call? Wallpaper that reacts to your real-world weather? Special app sounds?
Who has the time or inclination to discover and learn these features? If Bixby can be the bridge to the uncharted waters of feature phones, then it will solve a long-standing problem for these devices: feature bloat. Two years ago I wrote about how this was a growing problem.
“Innovative features are definitely, 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 de facto industry innovator (remember the Galaxy S5’s “smart pause” trick that paused videos if you looked away from the screen?).
“Because of this, Samsung phones feel feature-heavy and loaded with features that will never be explored by most users.”
That story was about Samsung’s generative AI model, Gauss, and how it might be deployed in the future. Two years later and it seems the feature bloat solution has long been on the minds of Samsung designers.
Dinham told me that Google’s Gemini is still the main 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 tight new assignment was a very secondary piece of information that executives only revealed in interviews. I understand; using AI to navigate increasingly complex operating systems isn’t as sexy as using generative AI to turn your dog into Batman.
For me, though, this is one of the most important new features Samsung has released in recent years. It will fundamentally affect the way people use their phones every day. That is, of course, if it works. Having done this job for longer than I care to admit, I know the difference between the promises of tech companies and the more pedestrian reality. We’ll know more once I get a chance to put the Samsung Galaxy S25 through my review car.