Kelvin Wankhede/Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung and Perplexity announce tighter Galaxy S26 integration, but users are confused by wake word support.
- Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas teased that “Hey Plex” would change to “Hey Perplexity”, but he deleted his tweet.
- The changes to the Perplexity Android app seem to confirm work on a new wake word.
Last month, new Samsung Galaxy S26 owners found themselves scratching their heads a bit over what was going on with their phone’s alleged integration with Perplexity AI. The companies announced that the S26 will support the platform’s “Hey Plex” wake word for quick access to the AI agent. Right from the start, something seemed to be wrong, with the app not showing up in the phone’s voice wake-up list, and even users who installed it manually later found that “Hey Plex” had stopped working. What was going on in the world?
While the statement Samsung eventually shared with us emphasized that this hiccup is simply due to an “ongoing product refinement process” and “does not impact the availability, integration, or scope of the Perplexity experience on the Galaxy S26 series,” that doesn’t really do much to explain the “why” of this glitch. Perhaps our biggest clue came courtesy of a since-deleted tweet from Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas, where he claimed that his company was in the process of transitioning to a new “Hey Perplexity” wake word.
With the release of the new 2.81.2 update of Perplexity on Android, we are now seeing actual evidence of this infection.
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These screens aren’t being used publicly in the app yet, but they’re now ready in anticipation of the new wake word:
As you can clearly see, “Hey Perplexity” is coming to the app. Why would the company feel the need to back away from its existing wake word like this?
Well, we haven’t seen any explanation given for this publicly yet, but the prevailing theory is that the AI company wants to differentiate itself from the Plex media streamer.
One thing we can see is that Perplexity is already bracing itself for the inevitable tongue-twisters that users will encounter as they repeatedly stumble into pronouncing the full “perplexity.” Adjacent to the “Hey Perplexity” references in app strings, we’ve also noticed some other similar sounds:
assembledebug/androidauthority
With any luck, this progress means it won’t be long until “Hey Perplexity” support formally arrives – and we’ll finally get the full Galaxy S26 experience we’ve been promised. Until then, we will wait patiently in the Purple City.
⚠️ One tearing apk Helps to predict future features of a service based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to the public release.
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