Samsung Bixby US launch reportedly delayed due to ‘big data’ issues

The Samsung Galaxy S8 might be one of the more impressive flagship smartphones to debut this year (read our review here), but its smart voice assistant Bixby — to which the phone dedicates an entire hardware button — is riddled with teething issues.

Sure, the service works in Korea, and even raps in Korean if you ask it nicely. But across the Pacific Ocean, it’s a completely different story.

Samsung has previously said that Bixby would be available to American consumers by May 2017. Of course, the date has since passed, with Samsung only revealing a US beta preview.

What’s the reason for the delay though? A new report by The Korean Herald has revealed more.

“Developing Bixby in other languages is taking more time than we expected mainly because of the lack of the accumulation of big data,” a Samsung representative told the publication Tuesday.

That’s a pretty big issue, no pun intended.

The likes of Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri are rooted in their accumulated data stores. Samsung is obviously fairly new to the voice assistant game.

But big data isn’t the only hurdle the company is trying to vault. Samsung engineers in the US and Korea are also experiencing communication issues due to the language divide between the teams.

The company has yet to re-confirm a launch date of Samsung Bixby for the United States, and that also puts the South African launch date in doubt.