Why doesn’t ‘Hey Plex’ work on the Galaxy S26?

Samsung’s latest smartphone lineup is finally here, as the S26 series ends pre-orders and enters its phase of general retail availability. But as more and more Samsung fans get their hands on those S26 models, we’re noticing a spate of reports that claim the phone’s much-hyped Perplexity integration isn’t quite working. What’s going on here?

In the lead-up to its Galaxy S26 launch last month, Samsung teased that it would be making the phones a veritable AI-agent smorgasbord, offering users access to not just Bixby and Gemini, but also Perplexity — all nicely integrated with wake word support.

To hear the story from early S26 owners, that was all working fine — at first. Sammy Fans mentions full Plex integration working just as expected when initially setting up a Galaxy S26 Ultra, only to see “Hey Plex” wake word support seemingly vanish after installing the recent February update — the same one that delivered that handy “inactivity restart” mode.

Sure enough, even though Perplexity itself still functions, and can even be summoned by the phone’s side button, wake word support appears broken. This sort of half-measure of Perplexity support, particularly surrounding the wake word, crops up elsewhere on S26 devices. Tipster Dylan H shares this shot of the S26’s new settings screen for selecting your voice assistant:

Even prior to installing the February update, Perplexity was refusing to show up in this list. The app didn’t even come preinstalled on the handset, and while it worked after manually installing, Perplexity still wouldn’t appear 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 the hopes of getting an official comment to share with you, but in the meantime, we may have spotted the explanation coming from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.

Responding to a user complaint about the S26 situation on X yesterday, Srinivas mentions that there’s currently an effort underway to transition from “Hey Plex” to a new “Hey Perplexity” wake word — and while he doesn’t out and say as much, it feels like he wants us to infer that this is a part of why things are so messy at the moment on the S26.

Considering that we already have another Plex, that move makes a fair amount of sense — but the timing here just could not be worse.

We’ll update this post with anything we’re ultimately able to confirm with Samsung.