Samsung is betting big on AI to make its flagship smartphone experience more exciting. Galaxy AI, the company’s suite of AI-powered features and utilities, was the central theme of the Galaxy Unpacked 2024 event last week. These AI-powered features are aimed to make your life easier while helping you become more productive and create rich content.
Generative AI went viral last year after OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot was released. Since then, we’ve seen a large number of third-party apps that aim to bring AI-based capabilities to smartphones. But these apps still don’t offer a great user experience, and most require a completely different subscription. Samsung has directly baked its Galaxy AI features into its native apps, uplifting the overall user experience.
Samsung has teamed up with Google to bundle AI services to its Galaxy S24 users. The company’s Galaxy S24 series smartphones use Google’s Gemini AI models to power some of the AI features. Samsung Notes, Voice Recorder, and Keyboard apps use Google’s Gemini Pro model and Imagen 2 powers the amazing photo editing features using generative AI in the Gallery app.
During a media interaction, Wonjun Choi, Executive Vice President at Mobile eXperience Business and Head of Flagship Product R&D at Samsung Electronics, told Gadgets 360 that Galaxy AI uses a combination of cloud and on-device AI, depending on the use cases. “The LLMs that are used on the cloud, that’s something developed with Google while on-device LLMs are a combination of both Google and Samsung’s proprietary algorithms,” emphasized Choi.
Choi has worked for Qualcomm and other global electronics companies and has expertise in wireless chipsets and smartphones. He had joined Samsung Electronics back in 2016.
As with most things, AI, privacy, and security are going to be some of the major concerns going around. Samsung has deployed a set of checks and balances to ensure nothing goes wrong. Each feature can be customized to ensure user privacy while making sure users can easily make out which photos have been generated with AI (by adding watermarks or metadata entries). Samsung’s Galaxy AI will not use any user or personal data to train its AI models.
Samsung’s decision to target productivity and some of the most commonly used native apps as the ideal use cases for its Galaxy AI features seems like a smart move. Generative AI capabilities in the Camera and Gallery apps are the icing on the cake. Other smartphone OEMs are more likely to follow Samsung’s lead in the future.
Galaxy AI features will come to other Samsung Galaxy devices in the first half of 2024 via a software update. These will primarily use cloud-based AI capabilities since older chipsets power them.
One thing is for certain: this is just the beginning of Galaxy AI. These initial core set of AI-powered features will simply set a base for what’s to come. The on-device AI capabilities on these modern chipsets, backed by a much longer duration of promised software updates, make one expect that these ‘AI phones’ would be much more long-lasting and offer a much higher value for money to consumers. The Samsung Galaxy S24 series smartphones will set an interesting precedent for Android flagships in 2024 and beyond.