Samsung revamps Bixby voice assistant with new look, icons

Samsung is reportedly rolling out a new update for its Bixby voice assistant. The update is not available to all users right now as it is getting rolled out in a staggered manner. Bixby’s new version comes with a new look that includes an updated icon and visual refresh.

Interestingly, Samsung has not officially announced the roll-out of the voice assistant. The updated voice assistant is likely to be available through Bixby Voice 3.0 that is available to Samsung phones running on OneUI 2.1 and OneUI 2.5.

The updated Bixby voice assistant was first spotted in a video shared by a user on Reddit. According to XDA Developers, the revamped Bixby looks like a blend of Google Assistant and Siri on iOS 14. One of the most noticeable changes is that Bixby no longer covers the entire screen. Instead, it takes only a small section at the bottom of the screen. The interface looks remarkably similar to Google Assistant. The icon appears flatter. It appears as a small horizontal bar when it is summoned.

The updated Bixby page has a new bar at the bottom that houses three icons – keyboard for text-based commands, microphone icon for voice commands, and a home icon to go to the home page. XDA Developers in its report pointed out that the colour scheme has been updated to a different shade of blue to more on black/grey side.

That said, it is probably the biggest update to Bixby in years. Samsung had launched Bixby in 2017 to take on Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Despite an aggressive push, which includes adding a dedicated Bixby launcher on some phones, the voice assistant has not gotten much of traction. Google, in the meanwhile, has continued to improve Google Assistant on Android phones. There have been rumours of Samsung phasing out Bixby in favour of Assistant on its phones. Just recently, Samsung discontinued a few Augmented Reality-focused features in Bixby assistant.