Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+: Bixby button can’t be reconfigured

Samsung has disabled the ability to reconfigure the dedicated 'Bixby' button on Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones.

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Bixby was launched along side Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. The voice-assistant aims to take on the likes of Apple Siri, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana.

Samsung has disabled the ability to reconfigure the dedicated ‘Bixby’ button on Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones. Bixby is Samsung’s new voice-assistant, the English-version of which hasn’t been rolled out yet due to performance issues. For users in the US, it makes sense to reconfigure ‘Bixby’ button and assign it other tasks given the delay. However, Samsung doesn’t feel the same way, and is compelling users to keep Bixby button for what it is originally meant to do – interact with Bixby, even though the voice assistant is missing from the phones.

Further, Samsung’s head of reviews program in the US Philip Berne, has put out a tweet confirming users won’t be able to reconfigure ‘Bixby’ button. Berne has clearly said the dedicated ‘Bixby’ button was never customisable and using third-party Android apps to do so is exploiting a system-level behavior, which Samsung doesn’t officially support.

@geoff5093 @Lostatsea1923 @One3OneKing @droid_life It was exploiting a system-level behavior. That behavior has been changed. Can’t say it will never happen, but we won’t officially support.

— Philip Berne (@philipberne) April 17, 2017

Bixby was launched along side Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+. The voice-assistant aims to take on the likes of Apple Siri, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana. Samsung’s Bixby is deeply integrated into apps, which makes it “fundamentally different” from Siri and Cortana is what the company claims.

Key features of Bixby include Vision, Home and Reminder. Samsung’s new voice-assistant can identify objects via Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8+’s camera. According to Samsung, Bixby is more “intelligent” and designed for “completeness”. It has been designed to perform tasks, which users would otherwise do by tapping on the screen, simply via voice-commands.

Dedicated button for Bixby was a bold move by Samsung, which hasn’t done so well in this domain in the past. But Bixby’s delay will make it harder for the assistant to compete against well established rivals, especially Google Assistant and Siri. Google Assistant, in fact, already does a lot of what Bixby can do; like displaying information in the form of cards. We’ll have to wait and see when Bixby finally launches for English speaking users.

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