Samsung’s biannual Galaxy Unpacked event is typically big on flashy new mobile hardware, but at this year’s event—held today in San Jose, California—it’s the software that takes the limelight. Powering the new Samsung Galaxy S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra is Galaxy AI, the catchall term for many of the new smart features debuting in the handsets.
Many of these functions (but not all) are powered by Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence model, and some of them already exist on Google’s own Pixel smartphones. Google has long dominated Search simply by being the default option everywhere—now it’s employing a similar strategy in leveraging Android to bring its AI prowess to a wider stage.
Did Somebody Say AI?
Forget the phones for a minute so we can talk about Galaxy AI. There’s a mix of on-device (via Gemini Nano) and cloud-based AI smarts (via Gemini Pro) on the Galaxy S24 series, though Samsung leans more heavily on the latter. If you see a star icon somewhere on the screen, that’s an indication that there’s a special AI function you can tap into. These interactions are powered by Google’s large language model.
For example, while on a phone call, tap the starry Call Assist button and now it’ll translate the call in real time, allowing you to speak with someone in another language, like the Universal Translator from Star Trek. (13 languages are supported.) In a demo, I placed a phone call with a Samsung employee—he spoke in Korean and I heard his speech translated into English, and vice versa. It was cool to be able to have a full conversation without having to look anything up, and while it wasn’t the swiftest back and forth, it felt speedy enough to keep the chat alive.
Translation extends to text messages too. Since this translation capability is baked into Samsung’s keyboard, it doesn’t matter which messaging app you’re using for your chats. Speaking of, there’s also Chat Assist on the keyboard, which can change up the tone of your sentences in conversations in case you want to sound more professional or casual, or if you need help getting your punctuation correct. My personal favorite messaging-specific addition is Photomoji, which lets you craft new emoji from your photos—very much like Apple’s Visual Lookup, which turns subjects from your photos into stickers.
Samsung’s built-in voice recorder app is getting a few smarts that resemble what you’ll find in Google’s own Recorder app, including real-time transcriptions and speaker labels to indicate who’s talking. Using Samsung’s web browser? Tap the star icon and you can get summaries of a webpage. Working in Samsung’s Notes app? You can summarize long paragraphs of text, check grammar and spelling, and even run through different formatting options that can automatically add titles, headers, and bullets.
