If you have a Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S9 smartphone from Samsung, you’re probably familiar with Samsung’s virtual assistant Bixby. While I use the Google voice assistant quite a lot, I haven’t gotten into Bixby. Part of that, I think, if because Samsung kind of jams it down your throat (or so it seems to me) and I’m a bit contrary.
There’s a button on the right of the phone just below the volume control that can only be used to bring up Bixby. I’m continually accidentally activating it by touching that button when I want volume. You can also pull up Bixby by swiping to the left from your primary home screen. Again, something I do accidentally on about an hourly basis.
While you can’t uninstall Bixby (Samsung is too invested in the concept), you can take steps to make sure you don’t accidentally activate it. First, you will have to summon Bixby by pushing the button the left just below the volume buttons.
You’ll see this screen.
Tap the three-line menu button at the top right.
Choose Settings from the drop-down menu.
Scroll down to General and then tap Bixby key.
Under Select what to open with the Bixby key, choose Don’t do anything.
Next, here’s how to avoid accidentally swiping and opening Bixby. Find a blank spot on your home screen and press and hold. Your screen should shrink down as shown below to display all of your screens.
Swipe left to the Bixby screen. See that slider switch at the top right. Slide it off.
With it switched to the off position, Bixby won’t pop up when you swipe left.
I’m sure Bixby can be perfectly useful. But since I’ve got Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana on staff already, I’m just not looking for another assistant. However, I’d love to hear from any of you that do use Bixby and find it helpful.
I have an S7, and I find all the additional apps that are installed by Samsung and Google to be quite annoying and if I wanted them I would have gone out to the App Store and gotten them. I intend to save this article so that I know how to disable Bixby when I’m facing it down in the future.
Thanks for the great solution to stopping to have to eat a product that we choose not to eat. Not only did your solution work it very well explained. If you you could teach others to explain so adequately.