It's been a week since Samsung's latest flagships - the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ have been available for the buyers around the world. Samsung nailed the hardware and software this time with the S8 lineup, but one important feature did not debut with the phones - the Bixby voice assistant.

Samsung announced it well in advance that it will be rolling Bixby afterward due to some optimization issues reported by the early testers. Now, in the latest development, Samsung has officially started rolling out Bixby in its homeland - South Korea. ZDNet reported the news of the rollout, today.

Samsung activated the voice assistant at 1 PM KST, after sending a notification in the morning to the Galaxy S8 users in South Korea. The company earlier revealed that it would be rolling out Bixby sometime in Spring for users in the US. But now it seems like Samsung might just complete the process by the end of this month.

For now, there is not any official statement by Samsung about the Bixby rollout timeline for the US. Despite the absence of Bixby's voice assistance, Galaxy S8 users in the US could still use some of the functions such as Bixby Vision feature that can intuit text and objects by using phone’s camera sensor. They can also use Bixby's new cards view feature that shows useful information in the form of card spread similar to Google Now.

Besides, Bixby is not just limited to Galaxy S8, even Galaxy S7 and S7 edge users can also install it. In fact, Samsung smartphone users with Android 7.0 Nougat can get the Bixby on their device. Also, Galaxy S8 users can remap the Bixby button to access Google Assistant in case they prefer the latter over former.

Bixby rivals already popular voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana. Now that Samsung has started rolling it out, it remains to be seen how well Bixby performs on the supported Galaxy devices. Samsung touts that its voice assistant can do anything that can be done with a tap.

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