Samsung could be resurrecting its ill-fated voice assistant, Bixby, with the help of AI-powered search engine Perplexity.
According to a new leak, the revived Bixby would operate similarly to its earlier incarnation, before Samsung sidelined the assistant in favour of Google Gemini in 2025. Basic tasks would still be handled by Bixby itself, while more complex queries would be passed to Perplexity. These could include hardware troubleshooting, web searches, and deeper research tasks.
Based on the leak, shared by Galaxy Techie, Perplexity would be able to deliver responses in a variety of formats, including Interview, Storyteller, and Tour Guide modes. This would reportedly include a live voice chat feature, allowing users to converse with the chatbot in real time, similar to Google’s Gemini Live.
While Perplexity appears set to be Samsung’s partner in Western markets, the company will reportedly use DeepSeek’s large language model in China.
Bixby served as Samsung’s default voice assistant for eight years after launching on the Galaxy S8. Despite offering functionality broadly comparable to Google Assistant and Siri, it struggled with more complex tasks. Samsung also frustrated users by continuing to include a dedicated Bixby button on its high-end smartphones, with no option to remap it in settings.
Samsung finally making moves in AI
While many major US tech companies have been consumed by the cost and pressure of keeping pace in the AI race, Samsung has largely avoided this scrutiny, despite arguably lagging further behind than Apple. This may be due to its more limited control over software and services on Android devices, where Google ultimately retains decision-making power.
That said, Samsung has begun expanding AI features across more of its hardware lineup. It recently unveiled a range of new AI capabilities at the launch of the Galaxy S25 FE and Tab S11 series, though much of this functionality was enabled through Google Gemini.
The company has also introduced Samsung Vision AI across its TV portfolio, allowing users to ask questions about on-screen scenes and continue conversations on connected smartphones or tablets.
Beyond software and services, Samsung remains a key player in AI hardware. It is the world’s largest producer of DRAM and NAND flash memory, which have become the latest highly sought-after pieces of hardware for AI workloads. Samsung also operates an advanced semiconductor foundry capable of manufacturing logic chips down to 3nm for AI accelerators and custom silicon, alongside its Exynos line of CPUs, GPUs, and neural processing units.
Perplexity gains another partner
This marks another major partnership for Perplexity, coming just two months after it announced a $400 million search deal with social app Snapchat. The company has been positioning itself as an AI-first search engine capable of drawing from multiple foundational models, alongside its own, while allowing partners to choose which models to deploy.
Perplexity was added as a search option in Mozilla’s Firefox browser in October last year and was embedded into Motorola’s Razr devices in April.
Alongside these partnerships, the AI search engine has been expanding how users interact with its product. It recently launched its own web browser, Comet, which was made free for all users in October.
Also read: Industry experts say 2026 will be defined by AI scaling, governance, and rising operational pressure in tech predictions for 2026.
