If past Samsung launches are anything to go by, then we should be seeing the Galaxy S21 debut within the next few months. As the release date approaches, we are continuing to learn more and more about Samsung’s upcoming flagship. For example, last week we learned that the S21 Ultra will get support for the S Pen and the Note series may be discontinued.
Now, a new tidbit leaked out about Samsung adding a feature to unlock the phone using a Bixby biometric voice option. The news comes from SamMobile and it’s rather sparse on the details, except that it is expected to be included in Samsung’s latest version of One UI. For the uninitiated, One UI is the name of Samsung’s software skin over Android, and the Galaxy S21 is expected to launch with version 3.1.
That would make the Galaxy S21 the first phone to run One UI 3.1, and it also means that the voice unlock feature could later come to other Samsung phones after they receive the software update.
Samsung has toyed with utilizing this feature in the past with Bixby having options to wake up your device and take commands. There was even a way to set a voice password, however, both of these are no longer available in Bixby. Perhaps the feature was pulled over security concerns, if so, I hope Samsung has made some improvements.
There is a lot of questions surrounding the new Bixby biometric voice option. We still don’t know when it will launch, if other phones will get it, how secure it will be, if it will work with a face mask, and so on. However, we do know that it will be on the Galaxy S21 for starters and it’s possible it could trickle down to more devices with the One UI 3.1 update.