Samsung’s “Bixby” still can’t speak English, plans speaker hardware anyway

Samsung is the latest company to plan a voice assistant in a box.

Voice assistant smart speakers are all the rage these days, and if Samsung is good at anything, it's at doing what everyone else is doing. To join the smart speaker lineup alongside the Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, and a Microsoft Cortana box, Samsung is apparently planning a smart speaker with its "Bixby" voice assistant integrated.

Samsung's "Bixby" voice assistant still isn't out yet in the US, but according to The Wall Street Journal, that isn't stopping Samsung from charging forward with a Bixby-in-a-box project apparently code-named "Vega." The report says "the timing is far from determined" and that "many of the speaker’s features and other specifications are yet to be decided," but Samsung has been plugging away at the project for more than a year.

Bixby is supposed to be Samsung's answer to other voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and the Google Assistant, but troubles with the English language have led to a delay in the US and other English-speaking countries. Bixby was supposed to launch with the Galaxy S8 in April, and it was a feature Samsung thought so highly of that it put a physical button dedicated to Bixby on the side of its flagship smartphone. After the April launch delay, Samsung claimed it would be ready in May, but it wasn't until June that Bixby saw a "preview" launch in English. Apparently, the final launch will still be in a few weeks. "Samsung internally believes [English] voice features are unlikely before the second half of July" the WSJ report said. "The timing of its US launch has been in flux and could still be altered again."

Samsung's Bixby speaker might not even be the first voice assistant box the company makes. Its Harmon Kardon division is launching the "Invoke" speaker this fall for Microsoft, but that device will feature Cortana and not Bixby.