One simple move will save your Samsung phone from losing support for Bixby Voice

According to SamMobile, those of you with certain Samsung phones still running Android 7 (Nougat) and Android 8 (Oreo) will be losing Bixby voice support on January 1st, 2020. The Bixby virtual assistant debuted in 2017 with the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the voice feature allows users to ask Bixby a question or give it a task by saying the hotword to activate it. Users could also press the Bixby button on compatible devices to activate the assistant. 

Besides Bixby Voice, there is Bixby Home which is a scrolling list of information related to topics like the weather, controls for smart appliances, and physical fitness activities that the user can link to by tapping on the appropriate button. Bixby Vision uses the camera on a compatible Samsung phone to translate a sign in a foreign language, return more information about the subject of a picture, find similar images and help users purchase items online. Some of Samsung's mid-range phones only support Bixby Home.

Besides losing Bixby Voice Support, these same phones will also lose support for Bixby Briefing. The latter shows pertinent information like the latest news and weather once the user's alarm goes off in the morning. This feature is enabled through the clock app when an alarm is set. The phones losing support for both Bixby features on Android 7 and Android 8 include the Samsung Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9+, Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+, Galaxy S8 Active, Galaxy Note 8, and Galaxy A9 2018. Since all of these models have been updated to Android 9, those who use one of these devices can keep Bixby Voice and Briefings by updating their phones to Android 9; to do so, simply go to Settings > Software update.

Samsung has not yet officially announced its plan to drop Bixby Voice and Briefing support on the aforementioned models running Android 7 and Android 8 but is supposed to do so sometime in the next few weeks. The manufacturer is reportedly doing this in an effort to get owners of older Galaxy models to update to Bixby 2.0. The latest version of Bixby features a new UI, better natural language processing and other improvements.Moving users to Bixby 2.0 will allow developers to stop spending time and money to support the older version of the virtual assistant.