Samsung did not talk much about Bixby, its personal assistant, when it was unveiling the Galaxy S9 in Barcelona, Spain. Turns out though, Samsung has not given up on Bixby and the company has bigger ambitions with its personal assistant.

Samsung’s mobile division CEO DJ Koh has revealed to the media at MWC 2018 that the company will indeed be launching a Bixby powered smart speaker in the second half of this year.

This is not the first time that we are hearing about Samsung working on a Bixby powered smart speaker. However, previous reports had claimed the company was planning on launching the smart speaker in the first half of 2018. The additional delay from Samsung in launching its own smart speaker makes sense as Bixby is not fully ready. Compared to all other voice assistants out there, Bixby is the most half-baked one. It has support for a limited set of languages and its voice recognition feature is not particularly accurate as well.

Samsung did not announce any major upgrades for Bixby at the launch of the Galaxy S9. Its likely that the company is working on a major Bixby upgrade which it plans to unveil alongside its smart speaker later this year. Samsung could take an approach like Apple did with the HomePod and ensure that its smart speaker offers outstanding sound quality which will be enough to entice customers.

Given how strongly Samsung is pushing Bixby through its various products, it is clear that the company is not going to give up on it anytime soon. Thus, if you are not particularly fond of Bixby, you should probably learn to live with it.

Update: D J Koh has also confirmed that Bixby 2.0 will launch alongside Galaxy Note 9 later this year. It will add support for multiple voices for multi-user support. Bixby 2.0 is currently being tested by over 800 partners to help Samsung further develop and enhance its virtual assistant.