In the early hours of the morning, Samsung held its January Galaxy Unpacked event, where it debuted the Galaxy S24, Plus, and Ultra. It was a software-heavy year for Samsung, and if you’ve been following the latest trend in the tech world, you probably knew what the big pitch would be: Galaxy AI.
‘Galaxy AI’ is the name Samsung is broadly applying to all of its AI features in the Galaxy S range of smartphones. The features range from giving you suggestions on your tone when sending a text message to removing reflections and shadows from photos.
We’ll be going through each feature one by one in this article.
All the new Samsung Galaxy AI features
Galaxy AI is new to Samsung with the Galaxy S24 range of smartphones. As such, all of the below features are not available on earlier phones or phones in other product categories, such as the Galaxy Z or Galaxy A devices. All of the below features work across the entire Galaxy S24 range, from the base model to the Ultra.
Live Translate
Live Translate is one of the features I’m most impressed with, and if you’re a travel lover or have family overseas, then this is one to know about. When you’re on a phone call, you can activate a Live Translation tool, so whenever each party speaks in their respective language, it’s then translated to the other user on the other end of the phone no third-party apps are required. A handful of languages are currently supported, including French, Mandarin, Spanish, and Korean.
Interpreter
Similar to Live Translate, Interpreter allows two people with different spoken languages to speak to each other in person. The phone enters a split-screen view, one side for each person in the conversation, where their sentences are translate between each other as they converse. This even works without Wi-Fi, which is really cool. Interpreter relies on the same pool of languages as Live Translate.
Chat Assist
Chat Assist is great if you’re after the perfect tone in a conversation. Simply draft up a text message to a recipient, and tap the AI enhancement button on the keyboard. Doing this will prompt Samsung’s AI to offer you suggestions on tone, with it able to offer you polite or more casual phrasings. This feature also allows you to quickly translate your messages into other languages.
Note Assist
To be honest, Note Assist is one that I’m a bit critical of. This feature gives the user AI-generated summaries of notes and webpages, and also gives users pre-generated templates for note formatting. When testing this feature, I found it disturbing that one of my articles that I worked hard on could be summarised by an AI in just a few dot points, although, paywalled content was not able to be summarised. We’ll be putting up a more fleshed-out piece on this feature later today.
Transcript Assist
Transcript Assist is basically Samsung’s answer to Google’s awesome Pixel recorder app, and allows users to transcribe spoken words to text automatically with AI. Spoken sentences can even be changed to other languages when transcribed to text.
Circle to Search
This is another cool one, although it’s hardly a whole-new feature. When long-pressing the digital home button at the bottom of the screen, the user activates Circle to Search, a feature developed in tandem with Google that allows the user to circle anything on their screen and automatically get Google results for it – like Google Lens, but a whole lot quicker. Users don’t even need to leave their currently open app to do this.
Generative Edit
Generative edit fills the gaps around an image when zoomed out, when there isn’t anything to zoom out to. How this works in operation is that, for example, the image will fill the space of a cut off building with more of said building, or a sand dune with more of said sand dune. Additionally, Generative Edit allows users to move objects in the photo around, make them larger or shrink them. Users can also add objects to photos, or remove them entirely. Additionally, users can remove shadows and reflections from photos with this tool, and Edit Suggetion will give recommendations on which of the above features to ues.
Instant Slo-mo
When viewing a video in Samsung Gallery, holding two fingers over it will now apply Instant Slo-mo, where AI fills the video with more frames and draws out the video’s runtime. This is up to a maximum of 120fps.
Super HDR
Samsung Galaxy S24 devices can now upscale your photos with AI – including older photos taken on other devices. Super HDR also appears as a preview before photos are taken, with added in brightness, colour, and contrast.
That’s about it for Samsung AI
Keep in mind that, for AI-altered images with Galaxy AI, a watermark will appear in the corner of the image indicating that it has been altered. Additionally, a tag gets placed in the photo’s metadata, so that the photo can be identified as altered.
The Samsung Galaxy S24 range of devices will be available from February 7, and are available for preorder now.
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Zachariah Kelly travelled to San Jose as a guest of Samsung.