Samsung Silently Kills Its Voice Assistant ‘S Voice’
If you have been a Samsung user in the past, you might have come across the S Voice assistant that the company used to ship in its Galaxy smartphones. As reported by SamMobile, Samsung is going to pull the plug on the old voice assistant on June 1, 2020.
The popularity of S Voice in current times could be judged by the fact that Samsung silently announced its death on a support page. Not to mention is the fact that the support page dates to April 1, and it took more than a week for people to notice it.
S Voice was first launched in 2012 alongside the Galaxy SIII. It used natural language to answer people’s questions, set reminders, make appointments, navigation, etc.
However, S Voice wasn’t developed from scratch by the company; it was based on the Vlingo voice assistant. Also, in later Galaxy devices, Samsung started using the Nuance voice assistant as the heart of S Voice. Eventually, the development of S Voice was discontinued in 2017.
The list of affected devices includes:
- Galaxy Note 2/3/4/5
- Galaxy A3/A5/A7/A8/A9
- Galaxy S3/4/5/6/6 Edge/7/7 Edge
- Gear S/S2/S3/Sport
- Galaxy Watch/Watch Active
S Voice has already got a successor in the name of Bixby. However, Bixby is also struggling to mark its presence in a world ruled by Alexa and Google Assistant.
Among many of its efforts, Samsung even added a dedicated Bixby button on Galaxy smartphones to promote the assistant. But, that didn’t help much as people started looking for ways to disable the Bixby button.
