It’s been a real WTF kind of year for car releases, new machines in new shapes with offbeat marketing leaning on gimmicky features that nobody asked for. Gimmicks are nothing new, but as I was pondering yet another incredibly quick, perfectly quiet EV, it occurred to me that I’ve been having an increasing number of head-scratching reactions to new cars over the past few years.
Samsung’s Galaxy Phones Will Soon Let You Answer Calls Without Having to Speak
Samsung is taking a page from the Google Pixel playbook with its upcoming One UI 5 software update, which will be adding a new way to take calls on Galaxy phones without needing your voice. The Bixby Text Call feature will bring the ability to answer a phone call by texting, with the Bixby assistant transcribing between voice and text on both ends.
The feature is only available in Korean to start, but it’s part of Samsung’s effort to make multitasking on Galaxy devices easier in the future — a theme it’s leaning into throughout One UI 5 to further differentiate its devices from Apple’s and Google’s. The company plans to expand into other languages, including English, next year.
Samsung isn’t the only one experimenting with ways to enhance the basic phone-calling experience. Google has rolled out a suite of new phone-centric features to Pixel devices that can screen calls on your behalf, wait on hold for you and even predict wait times when dialing toll-free numbers. Bixby Text Call is Samsung’s most prominent answer yet to Google’s ambitions to modernize phone calls.
“Bixby has evolved over many years as a specialized voice control agent,” Sally Jeong, vice president and head of the Framework Research and Development Group for Samsung’s Mobile Experience Business, said via a translator. “And it requires a lot of training of Bixby so that it can actually identify and understand the voices during phone calls.”
However, Samsung’s approach differs from Google’s. Rather than having Bixby take