Samsung is ending My Bixby Level which unlocked Samsung Pay rewards points

Samsung launched Bixby Voice almost a year ago. Since expanding to over 200 countries, the service hasn't received many feature updates to compete with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. Samsung's rumored Bixby Speaker and upcoming 2.0 update launching with the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 may turn things around but for now, Bixby Voice remains the worst voice assistant in the race. Now, Samsung has announced that they are terminating the "My Bixby Level" service on August 10th, 2018 which was only used for unlocking new backgrounds or earning Samsung Pay rewards points.

This service was used to unlock different backgrounds for the voice assistant user interface. Samsung has not said if these backgrounds would be available after the termination of the My Bixby Level service, but they said users who have already unlocked them can still use them. If you want to be able to unlock these, you need to level up by asking questions or telling it to do tasks. You have until August 10th to unlock these backgrounds.

Along with these backgrounds, the My Bixby Level service also allows for users to unlock Samsung Pay rewards points with each level. The number of points you could earn at each level would change depending on how high the level is. The rewards points could be spent on sweepstakes or on Samsung Pay Visa gift cards. This feature was added when Bixby was first released to encourage users to use the service but was kept in because users stopped using the service once the feature was removed. The rewards points you earned during the period in which you could unlock them will be kept in your Samsung Pay rewards points balance. To unlock more Samsung Pay rewards points, you can make purchases with Samsung Pay.

I had personally leveled up to level 11 before giving up on Bixby. The leveling service did encourage my use of Bixby but I personally don't think it's a compelling reason to keep using it. Sure, the rewards points are nice but paying users to use a feature just doesn't seem like a reliable way to continue business. Thus, it's no surprise to see the service being canned. You have until August 10th, 2018 to unlock everything before the service is terminated.

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