Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
TL; DR
- Samsung has partnered with Perplexity to introduce AI as an assistive option in the Galaxy S26 series.
- New owners were confused by inconsistent Perplexity wake word support.
- A comment from Perplexity’s CEO suggests this could be related to the move to Hey Perplexity.
Update, March 11, 2026 (9:48 PM ET): We’re still hoping to hear back from Samsung on our inquiry, but this could be another piece of the puzzle: Remember Samsung’s announcement last month that it was bringing Hey Plex to the Galaxy S26 family? Canceled Samsung original ad from the online newsroom.
You can still watch archival copiesand as we can see, Samsung has not sent any specific corrections to the announcement. (Thanks: Dylan H)
Original article, March 11, 2026 (12:21 PM ET): Samsung’s latest set of smartphones is finally here as the S26 series ends pre-orders and enters its phase. general retail opportunity. But as more and more Samsung fans get their hands on these S26 models, we’re seeing a flurry of reports claiming that the phone is much more. the much hyped Confusion integration doesn’t work at all. What’s going on here?
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Its lead-up Galaxy S26 Launched last month, Samsung said the phones would be a veritable AI-agent smorgasbord, offering users access to not only Bixby and Gemini, but also Perplexity – all nicely bundled with wake word support.
To hear the story from the first S26 owners, everything was working fine – at first. Sammy Fans when initially setting up the Galaxy S26 Ultra it mentions full Plex integration as expected, only to see the “Hey Plex” voice support disappear after installing the latest February update – the same one that delivered this convenient “inactivity restart” mode.
Of course, Perplexity itself still works and can even be invoked with the phone’s side button, but wake word support appears to be broken. This kind of half measure of confusion support is seen elsewhere, especially in S26 devices involving the wake word. Tipster Dylan H shares this screenshot of the S26’s new settings screen for choosing your voice assistant:
Even before installing the February update, Perplexity refused to appear on this list. The app doesn’t even come pre-installed on the phone and when it runs after manual installation, Confusion still won’t show up here.
So what in the world is going on with Samsung, Perplexity and the Galaxy S26? We’ve reached out to our Samsung contacts in hopes of getting an official comment to share with you, but in the meantime we can see an explanation coming from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.
Responding to a user complaint about the S26 situation on X yesterday, The Srinivas notes that efforts are currently underway to transition from Hey Plex to the new one “Hey Confusion” wake up – and while he won’t come out and say much, it sounds like he wants us to conclude that that’s part of why things are so messed up in S26 right now.
Considering that there is already another one Plexthe move makes enough sense – but the timing here couldn’t be worse.
We’ll update this post with anything we can confirm with Samsung.
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