For years, Bixby has been the punchline of Samsung’s software ecosystem. While Google Assistant and Alexa evolved into genuinely useful tools, Samsung’s voice assistant remained stuck in a frustrating loop of misunderstood commands and limited functionality. But leaked screenshots from One UI 8.5 suggest Samsung might finally be ready to give Bixby the complete transformation it desperately needs.
This isn’t just another minor update with a fresh coat of paint. The leaked images reveal a fundamental reimagining of what Bixby could be: a legitimate AI assistant that borrows heavily from Google’s Gemini playbook while adding its own twist through partnerships with services like Perplexity.
A New Interface That Actually Makes Sense
The most immediate change is how Bixby presents itself. Instead of taking over your entire screen, the assistant now appears in a floating window that hovers over whatever you’re doing. It’s a small detail that makes a big difference in usability. You can ask a question, get your answer, and continue what you were doing without the jarring interruption that plagued earlier versions.
The interface includes options to like or dislike responses, copy text, and view sources directly through Perplexity’s platform. That last feature is particularly interesting because it suggests Samsung is acknowledging what users have known for years: sometimes you want to verify information or dig deeper, and a good assistant should make that easy rather than pretending it’s the final authority on everything.
Opening Bixby from your app drawer shows conversation history through a side menu, similar to how ChatGPT or other AI chatbots organize past interactions. It’s basic functionality that should have existed from day one, but better late than never.
Perplexity Integration Changes the Game
Here’s where things get genuinely interesting. By integrating Perplexity, Samsung is essentially admitting that web search and real-time information retrieval matter more than they initially thought. Perplexity has built its reputation on providing sourced, accurate answers to questions, and plugging that capability into Bixby could finally give Samsung’s assistant the credibility it’s always lacked.
Beyond Perplexity, the screenshots reveal partnerships with The Weather Channel, HERE Maps, SkyScanner, and Uber. These aren’t revolutionary choices, but they’re practical ones that suggest Samsung is thinking about actual use cases rather than trying to reinvent every wheel themselves.
Circle to Ask and Bixby Live: Following Google’s Lead
Samsung appears to be developing “Circle to Ask,” which sounds suspiciously like their own version of Circle to Search, the feature that debuted with the Galaxy S24 series. The naming alone suggests Samsung knows exactly what they’re emulating.
Then there’s Bixby Live, which is essentially Samsung’s answer to Gemini Live. The feature allows real-time conversational interactions with different personality modes: General Agent, Interview, Listening Ear, Positive Speaker, Storyteller, and Tour Guide. You can switch between these modes depending on what you need, whether that’s homework help, travel planning, or just someone to bounce ideas off.
Bixby Live can access your camera viewfinder or screen, letting you discuss what you’re looking at in real time. The camera integration offers three modes: AI Solver for homework and problem-solving, Translation for live language interpretation, and General for everything else. It’s a direct response to Google’s multimodal capabilities, and while it’s not groundbreaking, it shows Samsung is at least trying to match feature-for-feature.
The Reality Check Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: everything in these screenshots is playing catch-up. Google has offered most of these features through Gemini for months. The conversational modes, the live camera analysis, the ability to upload and discuss documents—none of this is new to the AI assistant space.
What makes this development noteworthy isn’t innovation. It’s that Samsung finally seems to understand what users actually want from a voice assistant in 2025. They’re not trying to force a proprietary ecosystem down people’s throats. Instead, they’re building something that connects to services people already use and trust.
The document upload feature deserves mention because it suggests Bixby can finally handle more complex tasks. Being able to discuss PDFs or images opens up practical workflows that the old Bixby couldn’t touch. The podcast-style conversation feature for documents is lifted straight from Google’s playbook, but if it works well, most users won’t care about originality.
Will It Actually Launch?
The screenshots come from someone who rooted a device and dug through One UI 8.5 firmware files, which means these features exist in some form but might not be ready for public release. Samsung has a history of testing features internally that never see the light of day, so treating this as a confirmed feature set would be premature.
One UI 8.5 is expected to arrive with the Galaxy S26 series next month. Whether these Bixby upgrades launch with it or get pushed to a later update remains unclear. There’s also the question of device support—will older Samsung phones get access to the upgraded Bixby, or will it be locked to new hardware?
What This Means for Samsung Users
If these features ship as shown, Bixby might finally become something worth using. The combination of LLM-powered responses, Perplexity integration, and multimodal capabilities could transform it from a frustrating afterthought into a genuinely useful tool.
But Samsung needs to nail the execution. Google has spent years refining Gemini, and even with all its capabilities, it still stumbles regularly. Samsung is entering this space late, which means they can learn from competitors’ mistakes, but they also face higher expectations from users who’ve been burned before.
The real test won’t be whether Bixby can match Gemini’s feature list. It’ll be whether Samsung can make it reliable enough that users actually want to use it instead of just tolerating its existence on their devices. For a company that’s struggled with software consistency, that’s a much bigger challenge than adding new features to a leaked firmware build.
Images Source: Galaxy Techie / Reddit
