Bixby will start collecting sports scores and news next month

Bixby Home is getting smarter. Well, in the sense that now in the US, Samsung's virtual assistant will offer sports scores and up-to-the-minute news coverage through a partnership with theScore. Swiping right on "select" Galaxy device home-screens including the S9 and S9 Plus gives access to the stats and news. To make the feature a little more useful, you can even follow your favorite teams and leagues so only the news that matters to you will show up.

It all sounds pretty comprehensive too, with scores and news for EPL soccer, MLB baseball, NBA basketball, NFL football and NHL hockey. And if you need more than just scores, you can click a link in the content card and, if installed, theScore's mobile app will launch. The new feature goes live sometime next month.

Since Bixby hit the scene in 2017, it has played third fourth fiddle to the likes of Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant. Mainly, because it just isn't that smart. A year after its debut, we said that the assistant still felt half-baked. "The sad truth is, the version of Bixby installed on the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus isn't that much better than what shipped on last year's Samsung flagships," Engadget's Chris Velazco wrote in March.

To make matters worse, Samsung's CTO (and steward for Bixby) Rhee In-jong took a new gig at Google last December. The electronics juggernaut has also nixed support for its Bixby reward program. But maybe it isn't all doom and gloom. Perhaps, instead, Samsung is saving big feature updates for Bixby 2.0, which should arrive with the next Galaxy Note. If the new Bixby has more features like theScore's sports stats and news whenever it hits the market, maybe that'll help the digital assistant's chance of survival.



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