Samsung’s New AI Feature Dramatically Changes Your Galaxy

My biggest gripe about modern smartphones is that they’re too complex. This was true before the chatbots became The New Thing, but generative AI has only accelerated the problem. Samsung is first out of the blocks with its solution: a repurposed Bixby on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Feature bloat is a real problem. Every year new tools are released to both grab some headlines and supposedly make your life easier. I’ll let your current level of cynicism decide which of those you think is more important to smartphone makers.

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Samsung has long been one of the worst offenders for this, as I explained in a story two years ago.

“Innovative features are obviously, ultimately, a good thing. They are the culmination of years of feature development and software refinement. It’s not just Samsung that struggles with this, it applies to most smartphone manufacturers but Samsung has long been the industry’s de facto innovator (remember the Galaxy S5’s ‘smart pause’ trick that paused videos if you looked away from the screen?).

“Because of that, Samsung phones do feel heavy with features and laden with possibilities that will never be explored by most users.”

The Korean company is also the first to try and tackle the problem. Bixby has been repurposed as a helpbot that answers questions about the Galaxy S25, and in some cases, completes actions. For some baffling reason, this announcement was buried during the launch. To my mind, Bixby’s new job is one of the more consequential updates to Samsung’s future handsets.

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The idea appears to be that Bixby will be able to complete most tasks on a Galaxy S25 with natural language requests. “Anything that can be done by touch can be done [with your voice] by Bixby,” Lee Dinham, mobile experience product specialist at Samsung told me.

Bixby’s new role on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

Testing this out, I have been surprised at how well this works in practice. Simple stuff, such as asking Bixby to turn the display brightness down, worked and did so quickly. Surprisingly, the far more advanced Gemini struggled with most requests that Bixby comfortably handled. Here is a selection of questions I have put to Bixby over the last two weeks. Note: Bixby is activated by saying its name.

1. “Dim brightness.” This worked.
2. “I want to setup facial recognition.” I opened the facial recognition setup
3. “Auto edit this picture.” Added my “chosen filter” despite not having ever chosen one. This can be tweaked by selecting a filter beforehand as your default.
4. “How can I improve this picture?” When viewing the picture in the Samsung Gallery app, it opened the image editing suite. In Google Photos it gave me a step-by-step guide and suggested I use the intelligent optimization feature.
5. “I want to share my data with another device, how do I do it?” It gave me a quick guide in a pop up. I then asked it to do it, and it opened the relevant setting but didn’t directly complete the action. The key here is I asked to do something without explicitly naming the feature. This is important for people who don’t know their way around these phones. Gemini gave me an abbreviated Google search.
6. “Open the camera and take a selfie.” Completed this quickly with a timer (unprompted).

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Slightly more awkward questions

• “Put Gmail and the browser into split screen.” Completed. Gemini opened Gmail but didn’t create a split screen.
• “Take a screenshot?” Both Gemini and Bixby took a screenshot.
• “Take a video and make it 4k.” Both Bixby and Gemini started recording, but neither could complete both requests.
• “Make the text on my screen a little bigger, but not too big.” (This tests the AI’s understanding of relative adjustments) Bixby understood this and adjusted the font size slightly. This is huge for accessibility.
• “Find the setting that lets me change the animation when my alarm goes off.” Bixby told me how to do it, but couldn’t actually complete the task. The contextual conversation needs some work because while going back and forth with the AI, I said “change the animation background” and it opened Galaxy Themes to change my phone background.
• “Show me all the ways I can customize the lock screen.” (Test its knowledge of all the phone’s features) Bixby told me how to customize the lock screen and where to go. Also opened the option when I asked, but it didn’t walk me through options. This may be a bridge too far for any mobile AI.
• “Share this picture with Ed on WhatsApp.” Bixby completed this.

The results are mixed but promising. Clearly, the more complex multimodal requests still need work. It is also slow. In some instances it is faster to complete actions with a tap, rather than your voice. But this is Samsung’s first proper attempt at AI that focuses solely on the device. If the company sticks with it, Bixby could become an essential part of the Galaxy experience.

Bixby’s new skills as a helpbot focussed solely on device questions is entirely different from what Gemini, ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence are offering. It isn’t the sexy side of AI, you won’t generate an image of your cat as POTUS sat behind the Resolute desk, but you will find out how to turn on the mobile hotspot.

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This isn’t only important for feature discovery, but also accessibility. People who struggle to operate phones with their fingers have a legitimate alternative. The same goes for people who are not tech-savvy and are overwhelmed by the complexity of modern devices.

Throughout all of this, Bixby is completing some tasks on-device instead of sending your questions to the cloud, Samsung says. The company gives the examples of taking a screenshot and setting a timer, with everything else being sent to a server for processing. I don’t have a full list of every action that is completed on the device, but if Samsung can migrate all processing away from the cloud in future releases then that would only enhance Bixby’s credentials.

If the extent of mobile AI is refining this feature and keeping it entirely on device, to the point that it can understand and complete any request related to using the phone, then I will be an AI evangelist. Why? Because there is a clear, real-world, use case here on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra that is lacking in rival chatbots.