It goes without saying that Samsung's Bixby digital personal assistant is here to stay and its capabilities will only improve in the future. While it's not capable of doing this right now, it's possible that Bixby might help you set up your Galaxy smartphones in the future with voice commands.
This won't really be a groundbreaking feature, though, given that other assistants are capable of doing this already. Microsoft allows users to rely on Cortana to set up a Windows 10 PC with voice commands. It would likely do that on smartphones as well if Microsoft or OEMs made Windows 10-powered smartphones anymore.
Using Bixby to set up a Galaxy smartphone
Users have to go through the process of setting up their handset whenever they power it up for the first time or perform a factory reset. The steps involve activating it on a carrier, connecting to Wi-Fi, punching in the credentials and consenting to a bunch of things before the device can be used.
It's not really a cumbersome process, to be honest, I personally feel Bixby won't shave off a lot of precious time from the setup process if I just decided to do it manually. The performance of this feature will depend upon how much better Bixby gets at recognizing voice commands to offer any real benefit or simply risk becoming a novelty.
The possibility that Bixby might help you set up your Galaxy smartphone using voice commands stems from some strings discovered in the SetupWizard APK of the leaked Galaxy Note 8 Oreo beta. It would be a far-fetched assumption to suggest that this feature might be included in the Galaxy S9 because there has really been no concrete evidence to support this theory.
The strings discovered in the APK betray phrases like “Hi, I'm Bixby! Let's set up your phone,” and “You can read a button aloud to move on, or tap if you prefer.” So the way this would work is that if you're supposed to tap on the Next button to move forward, you can simply say “Next” and Bixby will take you to the following step.
This will only be truly useful if users are no longer required to say the “Hi Bixby” hotword for every command. If Bixby isn't always listening for a command during the setup process and users either have to press the hardware button or say, Hi Bixby, every single time it just defeats the purpose. Bixby 2.0 is expected to eliminate that requirement.
So while it's completely possible that Bixby could help you set up your Galaxy smartphone, a lot has to improve before this starts to make sense.
