Samsung Launches Galaxy S8 And S8+ Bixby Early Access Program In U.S.

Samsung's Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones are some of the best Android models available right now (read our review), but despite that, many of their users haven't been using them to their full potential. While Bixby Voice was revealed alongside the phone, it still hasn't made it to the United States in stable form.

If you're keen on trying Bixby Voice and don't mind that it's not in stable form, Samsung has the hook-up. At its website, the company is allowing S8 owners to sign up for an early access program that will ensure they get the latest Bixby features before anyone else. Note that this early access program is only for the Bixby solution.

Bixby Voice is going to prove to be one of the most important parts of Samsung's Galaxy ecosystem going forward, and it competes with the likes of Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana. It seems like these solutions are a dime a dozen, and each company claims to have the superior offering.

With Bixby Voice, users can chat with their S8 in a natural language to complete menial, and perhaps in the future, advanced tasks. Want to take a screenshot? On some phones, that's currently a chore, at least with the default configuration of holding the volume down and power at the same time. With Bixby Voice, you simply tell your phone to take one. 

That's about as simple as the interaction can get, though. You can also ask Voice to bring you to your favorite YouTube channel, set a newly discovered image as a wallpaper, set an alarm, tell the device to go into Do Not Disturb mode, create a photo album, and so on. Thanks to its artificial intelligence backbone, and contextual awareness, the possibilities are simply huge. When it comes to Bixby, we're currently on the ground floor, but there's so much more to look forward to.