Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa are among the most popular voice assistants and the ones you are more likely to interact with in daily life. You also get Bixby on the best Samsung phones, but the Korean giant has not updated its voice assistant with meaningful improvements in quite a while. That's changing now, as Samsung has announced a major Bixby update that makes it smarter and delivers improved performance thanks to an on-device mode.

Taking inspiration from Google Pixel's Call Screen, Samsung is expanding Bixby Text Call to English. The feature debuted with One UI 5 in October 2022 but was limited to Korea. With the release of One UI 5.1, Bixby Text Call works in English on the Samsung Galaxy S23 series, Z Fold 4, Flip 4, and others. When on a call, you can type what you want to say, and Bixby will convert it into audio and play it to the caller.

Source: Samsung Newsroom

You can customize Bixby's Text Call voice using the custom voice creator option. It lets you record different sentences for the voice assistant to analyze and create an AI version of your voice and tone. However, this option is only available in Korea, with the company planning to expand the AI-generated voice feature to other Samsung apps.

Further, Bixby is gaining support for a custom wake-up phrase, so you can record and use a hotword of your choice.

Samsung's voice assistant is also getting smarter by understanding context and remembering previous conversations. The company says you can start a Samsung Health workout and then ask Bixby to "play music for this workout." This will lead to the virtual assistant playing music that best suits your workout.

Lastly, thanks to on-device AI support, Bixby can recognize and process commands without an active internet connection. This includes commonly used actions like taking a screenshot, setting a timer, etc. Bixby's on-device mode is limited to English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Korean languages.

Samsung says it will start rolling out these Bixby improvements to Galaxy users in February 2023 through a software update.