🤖The Galaxy S26 Ultra throws a lot of AI at you. Some of it is genuinely useful, some of it is Samsung trying to keep up with Google and Apple. Here's what actually matters.
Okay, I know - Bixby has been a joke for years. But Samsung did something smart: they plugged it into Perplexity AI for real-time web searches. Now when you ask Bixby a question, you actually get useful, current information instead of "I found this on the web."
Even better, Bixby can now understand normal human speech for phone controls. Instead of learning specific commands, you can say stuff like "Why does my battery drain so fast?" and Bixby will figure out which settings to check and let you change them right there.
This is where it gets interesting. You can set up Gemini or Perplexity as your assistant and ask it to do multi-step tasks. Like "Book an Uber home" - and it actually opens Uber, fills in your address, and shows you the confirmation. It's like having a slightly dumb assistant who can follow simple instructions.
It's not magic - you can't say "plan my vacation" and have it book flights. But for straightforward tasks across apps, it works.
This one surprised me. The phone notices what's on your screen and suggests helpful actions. Looking at someone's event invite? It'll nudge you to add it to your calendar. Someone asks you to send photos? Gallery shortcut pops up.
It's subtle - not annoying pop-ups, just suggestions - and it's actually useful once you get used to it.
The camera AI is solid:
After playing with all of it:
The rest? I probably won't use most of it daily. But the Bixby improvements alone make the AI story way better than it was.
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