What is the most important new feature on your next smartphone? Is it a whopping 200-megapixel camera? Is it a battery that lasts two days? Is it lightning-fast facial recognition to unlock it?
The answer is your smartphone just got a whole lot smarter – thanks to artificial intelligence. And not just ordinary, earth-bound smarts, but Galaxy AI.
Samsung has been working on AI development for years, building this capability in new devices, and this is an obvious culmination of all that hard work.
Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, interest in AI has exploded. Generative AI, named because it generates things, took the world by storm in 2023.
And now that people understand how helpful this is, they want it.
Galaxy AI is designed by Samsung to make the things you do every day much easier, it says. From Stuff’s initial hands-on experience, that certainly seems the case.
Journalists are always taking notes and pictures, and shooting videos – so let’s start with those enhancements because we’re not the only ones who use our smartphones as our primary computers.
We’ve always been fans of the S Pen and how you can make notes as soon as you pop the pen out of its clever casing in the Ultra model (which was introduced with the S Pen as we bade farewell to that excellent phablet, the Note). But you can use an S Pen with all of the new high-end Galaxy models.
AI-enabled note-making
Another very useful feature is Galaxy AI’s ability to transcribe voice recordings that will work for up to a three-hour recording. The S24s detect as many as ten different speakers, and will also summarise the transcript for you. We’ve tested this recording and transcribing functionality on previous models, and deliberately in loud environments like a restaurant. The results were good then, and even better now.
You can also translate that transcript – as well as your notes – into the languages that Galaxy AI already supports.
Even more impressive is the AI’s ability to translate on the fly. It’s like having your own interpreter. These chats are based on the phone, so you don’t need to be online and the interaction therefore has no lag. This is brilliant for organisations that have no internet connection or for people travelling without roaming data.
When you do use cloud-based resources, your connection – and therefore your data – is protected with Samsung’s appropriately named Knox security.
Camera upgrade
We’ve been impressed with the 200MP camera in previous Ultra models and it’s joined in the Galaxy S24 Ultra with a 50MP telephoto lens (up from 10MP in last year’s model).
The ultra-slow-mo video recording is still impressive – especially for kids and other fast-moving objects.
There are also a range of useful ways that Galaxy AI will help you take – and then edit – better pictures and videos, which we will highlight in another article.
Hi boss
This seems like not much of a big deal, but writing is still crucial for our ability to communicate effectively and it’s a handy thing.
The AI functionality extends to pictures and will help you search for information. So, if you happen to be in San Jose or Venice and want to know something about the city you’re travelling in, aim the camera at a building (even if it’s in the distance), take a picture, and then circle what you want to search for. You can do this with any images you’ve saved to your picture gallery. See a pair of shoes you like on Instagram, do a screen grab, circle it, then wait for all to be revealed.
Samsung has been working on AI for years, and the groundwork shows. Galaxy AI is not an upgrade to its previous voice assistant Bixby (which we found underwhelming) but a notable leap forward. We look forward to spending more time with it shortly.