Rumors of the Galaxy S24 family embracing artificial intelligence have recently been gathering steam, and now Samsung has confirmed it. In a blog post announcing Galaxy AI, the company revealed that artificial intelligence will be “universal intelligence on your phone as you’ve never seen it before.”
Called Samsung Gauss, it will be “in all the places it matters most” with the promise of “barrier-free communication,” “simplified productivity” and “unleashed creativity,” Samsung says. It will function both locally with on-device AI developed by Samsung and with cloud-based AI collaborations with “like-minded industry leaders”.
Outside of Samsung Gauss, there are also several rumors about the upcoming ONE UI 6.1 that promises to offer several new features for the Galaxy S24 range. These include several AI improvements that will help user accessibility.
Buzzwords aside, what does that look like in practice? Here’s what we’re expecting Galaxy AI to offer.
Live AI translations
There’s one feature we know is going to feature for sure, because Samsung specifically mentioned it in the blog post: AI Live Translate Call.
“Audio and text translations will appear in real-time as you speak, making calling someone who speaks another language about as simple as turning on closed captions when you stream a show,” the company explains. This one uses on-device Galaxy AI, Samsung says, to limit the privacy concerns that present themselves when data is uploaded to the cloud.
This sounds very clever, but we’re not sure how practical it is. After all, if you don’t speak the language they’re communicating in, then your reply may still be meaningless to the person you’re speaking to — unless they happen to have an AI-equipped Galaxy phone too.
Generative text assistance
This one is a little bit more vague, occupying a single line in a Samsung press release, but it looks like the company’s AI will be taking a leaf out of ChatGPT’s book with its Gauss Language generative language model.
The release says that it “enhances work efficiency by facilitating tasks such as composing emails, summarizing documents and translating content.”
Composing emails is certainly an interesting proposition — but there are different ways it could be implemented. It could merely be offering recommendations as you type, or it could possibly generate an entire email based on a prompt — for example, writing a complaint letter to an airline based on a few key details.
As for summarizing documents, this is something that Google already does — but it requires Chrome or the Google app. Hopefully, Samsung will offer something a bit more universal.
Camera tricks aplenty
In the same press release, Samsung Gauss Image is mentioned: “a generative image model that can easily generate and edit creative images.” It can make “style changes and additions” and also convert “low-resolution images to high resolution.”
That all sounds promising, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung tried to mimic the Pixel’s Magic Eraser or Best Take features here too.
Finally, Samsung has also teased a few video features coming to 200MP cameras powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s AI smarts (i.e.: the S24 Ultra). AI tracking will allow you to keep tabs on a subject in a video at all times, while simultaneously filming both cropped and full-angle shots. It also promises “end-to-end AI Remosaic image capture,” which should offer “richer details and colors.”
Recent leaks indicate several new features coming to the S24's AI capability. These include the ability to upscale videos with improved lowlight performance, as well as grain reduction and improved stability. The AI could also be able to erase subjects from videos as well as photos. Finally, it appears that the Galaxy S24 will be able to gather important information from calls and offer options for better planning, as well as an on-device AI chatbot.
A keyboard that writes like you
Galaxy AI will also likely be integrated into the Samsung keyboard, making your responses to messages sound more like you — or a smarter, more witty sounding version. This AI-powered keyboard will not only offer tone detection for sentences, allowing users to choose from five tone options. Therefore, you can choose responses that have causal or professional tone, or simply going with emojis.
Galaxy AI is also integrated into Samsung Keyboard and Samsung Notes on the Galaxy S24 series. 👀This one person who tried the S24 has always used GBoard, but they're willing to switch to Samsung Keyboard just because of those features.Some of the new features on Samsung… pic.twitter.com/xl57wljONcJanuary 11, 2024
Samsung's Galaxy AI presence should also be present in the Samsung Notes app, allowing for hand-written notes to be converted into another format. For example, it could be smart enough to know you're writing a bulleted list and show that in the Samsung Notes app, saving you precious time from having to adjust it later on.
AI at what cost?
This all sounds very promising, but there are two big caveats.
The first is that the implementation might not be that good. After all, Samsung went big on its virtual assistant Bixby, and it’s still a bit underwhelming six years after being introduced — a pale imitation of Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri.
Secondly, one rumor suggests that Samsung intends to paywall some of its AI features behind a subscription. That may well prove to be nonsense — why would it give Google a free win with its free-to-use Pixel AI features? — but if not, it could majorly dent its appeal.
We’ll have to see what happens when the Samsung Galaxy S24 family is released. We’ve still got a few months to go, with one report predicting a launch event on January 17, which would likely mean the phone going on sale on February 2, 2024.
