How to Disable Bixby on Your Samsung Phone
What Is Bixby?
Bixby is Samsung's attempt to create a voice assistant to rival Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Assistant. Samsung is the world's biggest smartphone maker, which also has a successful line of home electronics, so it's not surprising that it would try to create a voice interface to tie them all together.
Bixby's features are very similar to other voice assistants. You can ask it the weather, set alarms or timers, make phone calls, send text messages, translate languages, do math, change your phone's settings, or create routines of multiple steps.
However, Samsung phones all run Android, and most people prefer Google Assistant as their voice assistant because it's better at answering general-purpose internet queries. Google Assistant can also launch apps and make calls, although it can't change your phone's settings.
How Do I Turn Off Bixby?
Bixby comes with the Galaxy S8 and later flagship Samsung phones, as well as midrange phones with model numbers between A50 and A90. Many of those phones have a Bixby button placed confusingly near the volume buttons, or replacing the power button, which is often why people want to remove Bixby.
Disabling Bixby has three main steps. You need to change the button behavior, turn off voice activation, and remove Bixby Home screen that appears when you swipe left from your main home screen. On newer versions of Samsung's software, that's now called Samsung Daily.
Right now, you can only completely disable the Bixby button on Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy S20 phones. You used to be able to disable it on earlier models, but that changed with software updates. I tested these instructions in June 2020 on Galaxy S20, Note 10, S10, Note 9, and Note 8 phones.
How to Turn off Bixby on the Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy S20
Turn Samsung Daily offHow to Turn off Bixby on the Galaxy S8/S9/S10 with Android 9 or 10
On earlier phones, you cannot entirely disable Bixby, but you can change it so the button requires a double press.
Turning Bixby settings offToggle Bixby Home offThat should do the trick. Chances are you're turning off Bixby to switch to Google Assistant, but if you're trying to go completely voice assistant free, we also have instructions for How to Turn Off Google Assistant.
For more Samsung tips, see our story on 11 Useful Samsung Galaxy Features You Won't Find on the Google Pixel.
