Samsung is finally rolling out one of the most touted features of its virtual assistant Bixby on the Galaxy S8 in Korea: voice commands. While the Galaxy S8 went on sale last month in most of the major markets of the world, it did so without Bixby being fully operational.

Samsung flipped the switch on Bixby’s voice command functionality in Korea at 1 pm KST today and informed users about the feature going live through a push notification earlier in the day. Despite its launch, Bixby’s voice command functionality will be severely limited as it will only work with a handful of Samsung’s own apps: Gallery, Settings, Camera, and Reminders. For now, the assistant is also only compatible with Korean and English languages, with support for other languages and apps to follow in the coming months. If the Korean launch of Bixby’s voice functionality is anything to go by, the feature should also go live in the US later this month.

The lack of voice command support in Bixby was surprising since there was considerable hype surrounding the virtual assistant even before the Galaxy S8 was launched. And Samsung even went ahead and included a dedicated Bixby button on the handsets which shows just how much faith the company has in the product.

From what it looks like, Bixby will only reach its full potential around the same time as Samsung will be releasing the Galaxy Note 8. For the amount of hype surrounding the assistant, Bixby so far has turned out to be pretty mediocre and just another Google Now/Assistant clone.

How impressed are you with Bixby so far? Do you think it is better than Google Assistant and Siri?