A few weeks ago, it was discovered that traditional hardware button remapper applications made it possible to change the dedicated Bixby button on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ to anything else. Naturally, many wanted the ability to change this button to launch Google Assistant or even Google Now. We covered this tip and wrote up a guide on how to remap the button to Google Assistant, but sadly this didn’t work for very long.

Not even two weeks later, Samsung started rolling out an OTA update that disabled this feature. The new update did exactly that by preventing Accessibility Services from intercepting this key event since this is how those regular remapping applications work. This change was confirmed by a Samsung representative via Twitter, and it caused a number of community developers here at XDA to start hunting for alternative ways to remap the hardware button.

So we wanted to highlight a few of those here today with the first one coming from XDA Recognized Developer . Their application is called BixBye, and it allows you to remap the button to a voice assistant, to launch an application, to open up the notification drawer, bring up the power menu, open the recents or take you to the home screen. Most of these remapping applications will actually just kill the Bixby service after it launches and then launch the one you want it to — However, the developer of BixBye says their application does not do this.

XDA: BixBye

Next up is an application from XDA Senior Member  called Bixby Remapper. This one lets you use the Bixby button to launch your camera, launch a specific app (like Google Now), play/pause music, toggle your flashlight and more. Lastly we have an application from XDA Member  called Custom Bixby Button. It works similarly to Bixby Remapper and will only trigger when it detects the Bixby app comes to the foreground.

XDA: Bixby Remapper
XDA: Custom Bixby Button

With the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ reaching the hands of more and more consumers, development on the devices was bound to begin sooner rather than later. Kickstarting the slew of software modifications on the S8+ Exynos variant is this release of TWRP.

XDA Recognized Developer and Contributor  has built TWRP for the Samsung Galaxy S8+ Exynos variant. The recovery build has been tested on the Korean and International variants of the devices and is confirmed as working on those, though the developer notes that it should work on other Exynos variants as well.

Installation for the recovery is through Odin. Users wanting to flash this must make sure to enable “OEM Unlock” in the Developer Options before proceeding with anything.

As kernel sources have not been released yet for the device, features like MTP are not available on this build. The developer recognizes that the recovery could be difficult to operate without MTP/ADB  (inability to transfer files from computer to phone) and when /data partition is encrypted (inability to view internal storage in TWRP). So to make life easier, two flashable zips are included in the recovery image itself. First, users can disable encryption by flashing the “no-verity-opt-encrypt.zip” and make /data encryption optional. Second, users can also root by simply flashing “Magisk-v12.0-arm64.zip” to install Magisk and then root their device using Magisk.

The availability of TWRP will make it easier to install other modifications on the device. While it might take a while for full-fledged AOSP based ROMs to appear on the device (especially on the Exynos variant), smaller modifications as well as TouchWiz-based modified stock ROMs will offer more choice to flash-happy users in the mean time.

Have you flashed this TWRP build yet on your Samsung Galaxy S8+? Let us know your experience in the comments below!

The Raspberry Pi 3 is the third generation single-board computer made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and like all previous iterations, the tiny computer is incredibly affordable and easy to mod. If you own one of these boards and are looking to turn it into a media center, then try out XDA Recognized Developer tabp0le‘s builds of Android TV based on Android 7.1.2 Nougat. Currently, DRM content and the YouTube app are broken, but bugs are to be expected with any initial release. The build does work with Kodi, however, and definitely opens up the possibility for Raspberry Pi devices to access the full suite of Android TV compatible apps as development progresses.

In July of last year, Google announced two new APIs for their Google Cloud Platform customers that had to do with speech recognition. These were made available in beta form to a limited number of developers and the Cloud Natural Language API and the Cloud Speech API. Along with being limited to a certain number of developers, the functionality of these APIs were also quite limited as Google was still working to enhance and optimize their capabilities.

The Cloud Speech API is Google’s own Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) service and it actually powers the speech recognition capabilities for a number of Google’s products (such as Google Search, Google Now, Google Assistant). Google took that technology and adapted it to fit the needs of Google Cloud customers and this was how the Cloud Speech API was born. Earlier this week, Google not only made this technology generally available to developers, but they also announced a big update for it as well.

This update includes a couple of enhancements to previous features and added support for some new file types. Some developers had complained that transcribing long-form audio wasn’t very accurate, so Google says this update will improve things on that end. The service is also faster in certain cases with developers seeing it being 3 times as fast as before for batch scenarios. The last highlight of this update is the added support for WAV, Opus and Speex file formats.

Since the launch of the Google Cloud Speech API, the company has seen a couple of popular use cases for the service. Naturally, Google has seen a number of developers adopting the service to add voice search, voice commands and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to their product. But they’re also seeing it being used for speech analytics and this has proven useful for businesses who are looking for real-time insights from their call centers.

Source: Google Cloud Platfrom Blog

Setting up ADB and Fastboot tools are pretty straight forward as all you need to do is download the binary and extract it to any directory. However, not many people know how to configure it to be system wide in Windows. That means most users are stuck opening up the command prompt in the same directory where the binaries are located, which can be a huge pain when you want to push/pull files located in other directories. If you want to learn how to enable ADB and Fastboot tools to be started in any directory on your Windows machine, check out this guide by XDA Senior Member .

XDA Member Sachi315 was able to get the first Developer Preview of Android O rooted on their Pixel phone, and now we see XDA Senior Member  has put together a step by step guide to help everyone do the same. The method involves installing an Android 7.1.2 ROM onto one slot of the device and installing the Android O Developer Preview onto the other slot (remember that the Google Pixel phones have two sets of partitions because of its seamless update setup), and flashing Chainfire’s Extra Delay SuperSU.

XDA Member  was able to get Arch Linux natively running on their Google Pixel C. Then they released the required files and even wrote up a step by step guide so that you can get it up and running on your device too. At this time, hardware acceleration is not working so Gnome Desktop is quite slow, WiFi is not working, and sound doesn’t work. This is mostly a proof of concept, pre-alpha build for developers to play around with, but hopefully it gets to a more stable point in the future!