- Samsung is revamping Bixby with natural language updates and AI-powered context awareness
- Updated Bixby integrates Perplexity for real-time web search directly within the assistant
- It will launch publicly with One UI 8.5, starting with the Galaxy S26 and expanding later.
Samsung’s Bixby is back. Or at least, a newly revamped and improved version of the AI assistant is back. Bixby returns with a conversational facelift, a Perplexity-powered brain, and a place in Samsung’s One UI 8.5 beta operating system, which began rolling out to Galaxy S25 testers this week. Bixby promises to sound more natural, understand conversational context, and actually do the things you want.
Samsung confirmed that the new version of Bixby will debut publicly with the first stable version of One UI 8.5 in a blog post, which it mysteriously deleted shortly after publishing it. The announcement said that Bixby will arrive alongside the Galaxy S26 series in the coming weeks. For now, it’s limited to a beta version in select markets, but its ambitions are global.
The biggest change may be that Bixby finally understands what you mean and picks up context like it never has before. Ask it to keep the screen on while you use your phone and it will change the settings without getting lost in the Internet. The new Bixby aims to eliminate the moments of error that so many former users complained about.
And the Bixby model will not be only on the smartphone. Samsung has integrated Perplexity, the AI search tool engine with real-time data. That means Bixby acts as a gateway to Perplexity knowledge, providing up-to-date answers without a browser or multiple apps.
For Samsung, the change is both strategic and technical. The company has been heavily promoting Google Gemini on Galaxy devices. But Bixby is Samsung’s baby, created as a response to Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Now, by combining the device knowledge of Bixby with the broader search intelligence of Perplexity, Samsung can offer a different experience to modern alternatives like ChatGPT or Gemini.
The new Bixby is trying to become the first voice assistant that’s actually decent at both providing AI-based responses and acting as your device’s concierge. Imagine telling your phone, “Don’t let the screen turn off while I’m cooking” and it staying on. Or ask, “Why does my battery run out overnight?” and get a response based on both your settings and search data. This is the kind of help Samsung wants Bixby to provide.
Bixby is reborn
Still, Samsung has a reputation to overcome. Bixby has spent most of its existence as the first feature that Galaxy owners turned off. It tried to distinguish itself through Samsung-only features, but even on Samsung’s own operating system, Bixby has been overshadowed by Google services.
Seeding the new Bixby as part of a beta version may help Samsung polish the AI assistant so that doesn’t happen again. As a relaunch, it stands out for not changing its name to Bixby 2.0 or Bixby+. Samsung’s assumption is apparently that if the tool is useful, people will come back.
If Bixby can understand informal language and context well enough to manage phone settings and search for information without having to juggle apps and tabs, Samsung could achieve its resurrection attempt. Modern smartphones are complex. If Bixby can reduce friction, people might be able to talk to it. That’s all most of us wanted from voice assistants in the first place.
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