When Samsung launched Bixby, it was already late to the virtual assistant scene. Compared to other well-known offerings in the market, it was lacking in features and supported languages. Initially, the company kept promising support for more languages but didn’t offer any specifics. After a few comments here and there, Samsung finally announced at its developer conference that Bixby would soon support English (UK), German, Spanish, Italian, and French languages.
In December last year, Bixby started supporting these languages in beta form on the Galaxy Note 9. It appears English (UK), German, Spanish, and Italian are finally out of beta and now available on all other Bixby-enabled Galaxy devices running Android Pie. Though the French language is also listed, it is still marked as beta. We can see these languages on our Galaxy Note 9, Galaxy S9/S9+, and Galaxy S8/S8+ on Android Pie. Our Galaxy Note 8 with Android Oreo doesn’t display these languages in Bixby, confirming the requirement of Android Pie to use Samsung’s virtual assistant in these languages.
It is not clear if this is a server-side change on supported devices or requires a Bixby update. For what it is worth, these languages are available for use in Bixby version 2.0.52.14. Samsung will probably announce the expanded language support at its Galaxy S10 Unpacked event in San Francisco today.
