Samsung delays North American Bixby release due to lack of English language data

The English launch of Bixby, Samsung’s voice-activated virtual assistant, has been officially delayed, according to The Korean Herald.

In a statement issued to the publication on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Samsung blamed insufficient amounts of English language data for the company’s inability to deliver Bixby to English-speaking S8 users on time.

“Developing Bixby in other languages is taking more than we expected because of the lack of the accumulation of big data,” said the company representative.

Bixby, like Google Assistant and Siri, uses advanced machine learning algorithms to deliver its feature set. To be effective, AI learning algorithms depend on large swaths of data since essentially what they’re being asked to do by their creators is to develop their own rule sets for solving complex problems like image recognition or natural language acquisition. In the case of Samsung, it appears the company, being based in South Korean, had significantly more Korean language data than it did English data.

Samsung announced Bixby in May alongside the Galaxy S8. It was originally scheduled to arrive in the U.S. and Canada before the end of spring.

Today’s announcement follows a report The Wall Street Journal published in May that said Samsung was running into issues getting Bixby to properly understand English syntax and grammar.

Another issue, according to a source that spoke to The Korean Herald anonymously, is the geographic and language barriers between Samsung Research America, the part of Samsung leading the development of Bixby’s English version, and the company’s headquarters in South Korea.

MobileSyrup has reached out to Samsung to ask when Canadians S8 users can expect to see Bixby arrive on their device now that it’s been officially delayed.

We will update this article when and if we hear back from the company.

Update: A Samsung Canada spokesperson had the following to say about the delay. “Thank you for your interest in Bixby. At this time we have no further information to share. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.”

Source: The Korean Herald