How to Translate Text with Bixby on the Galaxy S9
While Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant battle it out for space in your home, Samsung is still tinkering with making its digital assistant a more valuable companion on your smartphone. And while Samsung’s Bixby may not be as ubiqutous as the other assistants, a lot of effort went into making it smarter on the Galaxy S9.
One useful new feature introduced to the updated Bixby on the Galaxy S9 is live language translation, which makes translating text from images easier. Bixby offered language translation on the Galaxy S8, but it was a little more cumbersome: You had to open the Camera app, select Bixby Vision, toggle over to Text, highlight the text you wanted to translate and then tap to translate. With the S9, most of those steps are now unnecessary.
MORE: What You Can Do With Bixby on the Galaxy S9
Here’s how to use Bixby’s new live translation feature with the S9. —Caitlin McGarry
1. Open the Camera app.
2. Point the S9’s camera at a sign, menu or other text or image you want to translate and tap the eye icon on the lower left-hand corner of the camera preview screen to access Bixby Vision.
3. Tap the T for Text on the bottom of the camera preview screen.
4. Bixby will automatically detect which language the text is written in and translate it, if the language is one of the 51 input languages or 104 output languages that Bixby recognizes. You can also manually select which language you’re reading and which language you want the text to be translated to, if Samsung’s AI doesn’t figure it out properly. Just tap on the language you want to change, and make your pick from the subsequent menu showing available languages.
The newly translated text will hover on top of the old text in the live camera preview. Bixby isn’t always accurate, nor does the assistant recognize every word, but when trying to translate a menu of Catalan food into English, Bixby figured out more items than I could.
