Samsung has today announced that an update for its digital assistant, Bixby, is rolling out with support for Indian English. The Bixby 3.0 update is “aimed at controlling of daily scenarios through the new and improved Indian English avatar,” as per the blog post.
What’s the benefit of using Indian English, you ask? Samsung says that Bixby can now “understand Indian names, places, relationships, content, and recipes” among many other things. Users can even ask the voice assistant to place calls to relatives or family members by saying, “Hi Bixby, call Maa” (Maa = Mother) or “Hi Bixby, call Bhaiya” (Bhaiya = Brother). You will need to define the relationships, along with the corresponding contact, in the Bixby app to make use of this nifty new feature.
We first learned about Samsung’s plan to introduce Indian English support a couple of weeks ago. If you open the Bixby app on a supported device, you will see a banner at the top which reads – “Indian English Available Now!!” You can tap on this banner to change the assistant’s language to English (India). This language option will be available by default when setting up new phones. You can see the screenshots for this new feature attached above.
Besides the Indian language support, Bixby can now help you start recording slo-mo videos, enable power-saving mode, turn on/ off the wireless hotspot, and remember your vehicle’s parking spot as well.
The Bixby 3.0 update is currently available on the flagship Galaxy S21 series and the recently launched Galaxy A52 and Galaxy A72. Samsung states that Galaxy Note 20 series, S20 series, and Galaxy Fold are next in line to receive the new India-centric features. Go ahead and switch the language in the Bixby app if you have one of these supported devices ritgh away.