Bixby gets cool new feature in One UI 9.0 that even Siri doesn’t have

Samsung is reportedly working on a new way to wake Bixby

This feature is supposed to debut on One UI 9

So to understand the utility of such a feature, imagine that you are walking down the street and realize that you need to remind yourself to pick up a greasy, translucent bag of Five Guys fries for dinner. Your hands are full, you really can’t tap the icon, and saying the wake word is just too slow. All you need to do is lift the phone, put it up to your face, and remind yourself to bring home a bag of grease.

Bixby gets a great new feature on One UI 9.0. | Image by PhoneArena

The fly in the ointment

There is one possible fly in the ointment. Having this sensor monitoring things in the background could result in draining your phone’s battery. This is just conjecture, but sensors monitoring users’ activities in the background often consume a large amount of power.

There is also another possible issue

Another issue is that there might be times when you mindlessly lift your Galaxy phone and bring it towards your face, activating the assistant without having any intention of doing so. Samsung is going to have to add some ways in which users can protect themselves from both possible issues. No one wants to have to deal with a rapidly depleting battery and perhaps giving users the ability to toggle off the feature when necessary will help on that end.

As for the accidental activation of Bixby, there might not be a way around that except to tell users not to mimic the gesture when they really have no desire to activate Bixby.

If Samsung users find that they enjoy activating Bixby in this fashion, it will be interesting to see whether Apple and Google decide to offer a similar feature to Siri and Gemini users respectively.