In recent weeks, Samsung has rolled out a handful of seemingly huge, AI-related updates to most of its 2025 TV lineup. These updates include the addition of Perplexity AI and, as of last week, an all-new, AI-powered Bixby assistant.
Yes, that's right: Bixby is back... in generative-AI form.
Accessing Bixby and Perplexity on 2025 Samsung TVs
My journey begins the way many do in these times: with the signing away of my personal information. Once you agree to share with Samsung your search history and “inputs” (described as questions, queries, search requests, voice and possibly your location), you’re free to jump into the new and bizarre world of Vision AI.
The quickest way to access most of your Samsung TV’s various AI-based features is by pressing the Vision AI button found on most 2025 Samsung remotes. (It’s the one whose icon looks like four tiny cartoon sparkles.)
This will drop you into a blue-and-purple tinted home screen that greets you personally: “Good day! How may I assist you?”
It’s weird. It’s unintuitive. It stinks.
The message is worded in the style of a virtual AI assistant, but it’s unclear which assistant is supposed to be doing the talking. There are several candidates, as the home screen grants access to both Perplexity and Copilot. Bixby — the one I’m most interested in — is noticeably absent from the arrangement of clickable tiles.
I decide to start with Perplexity before resuming my search for Bixby. Clicking on the Perplexity icon brings me to a simple splash screen with a microphone icon in the middle of it. “Ask Anything,” it prompts.
Upon reading this, I instinctively hold down the microphone button on my remote control. But doing this causes a pop-up to appear on the Perplexity splash screen informing me that, if I want, I am now free to start using Bixby.
At this point, I’m realizing my mistake: I tried to use my remote control’s built-in microphone to ask Perplexity a question, but the Perplexity splash screen was prompting me to hold down an on-screen button so that the TV’s microphone could listen to my question instead.
In other words, Bixby is on standby, but Bixby can presumably only be called upon by way of the remote control’s microphone. Both assistants are on standby at the same time — sometimes even colliding on screen — but their means of engagement remain entirely separate. It’s weird. It’s unintuitive. It stinks.
It’s impossible to ignore, too, the relentless obsequiousness of these assistants that keep bumping into one another. Every screen and pop-up window showers you with prompt suggestions.
“Where’s a good place to travel this season? Are there any paintings with peaceful morning vibes?” You get the sense that, if these assistants had physical forms, they’d be smushed up against the inside of the TV screen, breathing heavily and awaiting instruction at all times.
Determined to ask my TV something — anything — I turned my attention back to Bixby. This is where I started to feel like I was losing my mind.
Testing Bixby and Perplexity AI
I wanted to ask Bixby something for which an answer might be genuinely helpful. I also wanted to engage with it in a way that the average person might.
To this end, I skip the pleasantries of asking about paintings with peaceful morning vibes and cut right to the chase: “What’s on TV tonight?”
Bixby tells me that it’s perfectly willing to help, but that it needs my zip code to provide a proper listing. “Shows like ‘Blue Bloods,’ ‘NCIS,’ or ‘Murder in the Pacific’ could be on.” Thanks, Bixby, but I’d rather you have my zip code so I could get a response that’s more than just a hunch.
So I tell Bixby my zip code. It disregards the first digit — a zero — and tells me that zip codes traditionally have five digits. I tell it my zip code again. Bixby gets it wrong again.
Finally, by pronouncing the first digit as “zero” instead of “oh,” I’m able to get my zip code through to Bixby.
“Thanks for sharing your zip code! In [location], you can catch ‘The World Today’ at 4 p.m. If you’re in the mood for a movie, ‘Raw Deal’ (1986) is playing at 4 p.m. Enjoy your evening!”
Beneath this reply is a ribbon of “related content” I can choose from: a bunch of random YouTube videos that happen to have my city’s name in the titles.
This is the extent of Bixby’s response to my softball question of what I can watch on my Bixby-equipped TV tonight: news at 4 p.m. or a movie from 1986 (also on at 4 p.m.) If this answer isn’t helpful enough, I can always take the sting out of it with a handful of YouTube videos that may or may not have something to do with the topic at hand.
Feeling frazzled, I jump over to Perplexity to ask it the same question. Please, Perplexity, just tell me what's on TV tonight.
Perplexity doesn't ask for my zip code at all. Instead, Perplexity mag-dumps a massive stream of text at my face, seemingly listing every piece of information about tonight's TV schedule from at least 20 different online sources.
It is a monument of crap — bits of partially useful information, blended together and erected into a wall of words I can't stand to look at. Next to the wall is a blown-up, low-resolution image of a real-life TV guide, its words are too blurry to read.
Samsung Vision AI: outlook
I would love to report on this stuff with as much excitement as every press release has begged me to feel. I would love to tell you that Bixby, Perplexity or any other AI-based, TV-bound chatbot is as useful and as fun to use as I've been told. But truthfully, I've yet to encounter one that actually works to an impressive degree.
The experience is made worse on a lower-end TV like the one I was using. The Samsung Q7F is an affordable QLED with modest hardware; its processor struggled to keep up with Perplexity and Bixby even when the assistants weren't providing much information. Perhaps they run smoother on a higher-end Samsung TV.
But these hiccups are almost beside the point. It's not just that Bixby almost went down swinging on an 0-2 count because it couldn't make heads or tails of my zip code (the zip code that Bixby itself asked for). It's not just that, when I asked Bixby later to tell me what was on TV tonight a second time, it skipped my zip code altogether and settled on two completely different TV recommendations, seemingly at random.
These issues are technical. As I see it, the bigger issue is that there are easier ways to figure out what to watch on TV tonight. There are easier ways to figure out where to travel, or to see paintings with peaceful morning vibes.
Is there anyone out there — anyone at all — using any of this stuff? I am genuinely curious. Sound off in the comments. Please help me figure out the appeal.
Toward the end of my afternoon, as I wound down my testing, I came up with one more prompt that I felt matched many of the use cases I had seen people demonstrate in Samsung Vision AI advertisements. I asked how to make spaghetti.
Bixby didn't know how to make spaghetti, which I guess makes sense. Bixby isn't real. But Bixby did recommend several spaghetti-related YouTube videos.
When I asked Perplexity how to make spaghetti, Perplexity didn't respond. I asked again. Nothing. This went on for a few minutes, and then the reality of the situation hit me: I was sitting on my floor, yelling at my TV to teach me how to make spaghetti, and it was all so I could convince myself that maybe it would be cool if my TV could do something I never wanted my TV to do in my life.
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