In the latest news, ever since the unraveling of its upcoming Galaxy S8, Bixby, Samsung's newest virtual assistant for the company's new flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone, is now reportedly working on older Samsung phones that are running on Android 7.0 Nougat. However, this has not been made official by the company.

According to Venture Beat, a person who goes by his online handle 'takerhbk' in a forum on the Android website XDA-Developers, has managed to get Bixby working and functional on top of the Galaxy S8's launcher, which was leaked earlier this week. Takerhbk then shared the Android Package Kit (or APK file) for Bixby itself, alongside the APK for the S8 launcher.

XDA-Developers' Mishaal Rahman has also noted that he had gotten Bixby working on his older Galaxy S7 smartphone, and others in the said forum have succeeded in deploying Bixby to their older Samsung phones as well.

Android Package Kits can appear right before app updates arrive in the Google Play Store. However, Samsung hasn't been showing plans about bringing Bixby to the Play Store; Samsung did not immediately respond to an issued request for them to make a comment.

According to Tom's Guide, it is worth noting that older Samsung phones, like the Galaxy S7 from last year, doesn't have a dedicated hardware button in order to access Bixby, whereas there is already one incorporated on the Galaxy S8, which is currently available now for preorder starting at $720. This implies that the Bixby experience between the Galaxy S8 and older Samsung phones could potentially end up being different.

According to other reports, Bixby isn't the only AI assistant that Samsung smartphone owners can use on their Samsung older phones running Nougat. Google has also been working towards bringing the Google Assistant to every phone that is currently running Android Marshmallow Nougat

Microsoft's Cortana is also available on the Google Play Store. Amazon, on the other hand, has also begun bringing it's Alexa virtual assistant to smartphones.

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