One simple question used to crash Bixby, version 4 finally fixes it

One of my favorite pastimes is testing Bixby’s limits and trying to crash it with simple voice commands. I’m exaggerating, of course, but there is some truth to that.

I recently found that virtually anyone could crash Bixby by asking the right — or wrong — question. And you can still do that as long as you're running an older version of Bixby 3.

The new one is Bixby 4. It debuted with the Galaxy S26 series and is now rolling out to more devices.

Before this update, Bixby 3 could crash if asked a deceptively simple question:

For whatever reason, older Bixby versions couldn’t handle the query. They’d return a generic “say Hi Bixby” response and immediately crash.

Bixby 4 fixes that. The assistant no longer crashes when asked about its version. Then again, as you can see in the screenshot below, the answer Bixby 4 finds — although better than Bixby 3's — still leaves something to be desired.

The upgrade to version 4 transformed Bixby from a basic virtual assistant to an agentic AI capable of understanding context and your device. At least, that's the idea.

The result is that you can now tell Bixby how you'd like your phone to behave, and ideally, the AI will find and/or suggest the appropriate settings for you to change.

A popular example is telling Bixby that your eyes are fatigued, and the assistant will suggest display settings you can change to make the screen easier on your eyes.

Samsung appears to have fixed the crash bug during this transition to a proper large language model. Even so, Bixby 4 still struggles with the original question. It won’t tell you its version and instead pulls a somewhat generic web search result, but at least it stays open.

That’s progress, but also a revealing miss. If Bixby 4 is supposed to understand your device, failing to identify itself feels like a low bar it still can’t clear. I feel like that's the simplest test it should be able to pass, and yet, at the moment, it can't.

Still, Bixby will continue evolving. Samsung is betting big on AI, with a long-term vision where voice becomes a convenient way of interfacing with Samsung devices across everything from phones to home appliances. I'm sure it will get better, and one day, it might overcome these hurdles.