Galaxy AI Unveiled: 3 New AI Features launching with the S24 Series that you should be actually looking out for!
The recent Samsung Unpacked ’24 seems to be creating a buzz — not for just the new flagship phones but rather the Galaxy AI features the new phones are coming out with.
Introduction
We are nearing a saturation point in smartphone hardware innovation. The recent Samsung Galaxy Unpacked’24 event proves just that. In fact, Samsung took it a step ahead by naming their annual flagship smartphone release event after a software leap they felt confident taking — Galaxy AI, an umbrella term for all new artificial intelligent features coming to their new S24 series of phones.
Samsung spent less than fifteen minutes (of a seventy-minute event) talking about hardware changes coming to the new S24 series of Galaxy phones (more at the end of this story). They even started off the event by announcing that their new S24 series will receive up to seven years of software and security updates (giving the Google Pixel a fistbum and the iPhones, a smirk).
With their primary focus on AI-driven features, they proceeded to talk about them for the rest of the hour. Here are the top three that caught my attention…
- The 4 New Galaxy AI Assistants for Calls, Chats, Notes Voice Memos, and AI Keyboard ft. Generative Texts
- Circle to Search with Google
- Photo Editing ft. Generative AI
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…and here’s why you should look out for them:
1. The 4 New Galaxy AI Assistants for Calls, Chats, Notes Voice Memos, and Magic Compose
Yup, there are a lot of new AI Assistants making a debut this year and Samsung seems to be leading them.
Call Assist is a feature that seems to be taking Google’s Call Screening a step ahead (in the right direction). It’s a two-way, real-time voice and text translation of phone calls.
Say, you receive or make a call to someone who speaks in a foreign language — the new Call Assist feature will not only provide a transcript of the caller’s voice but also translate it for you in your language. Adding on to this, it can also answer the caller in their language and translate their voice for you in your preferred language, completely muting both voices.
Now, that’s pretty badass! At one point, I can’t help but imagine that there would be two robotic voices communicating with each other. At launch, Call Assist is available in 13 different languages in the native call app.
This also extends to chats, which is called Chat Assist and helps translate the sender’s texts from a foreign language to your native language by just activating this new assist feature within the app.
They also have a teaser of an Android Auto feature where an incoming message is automatically summarized and relevant replies and actions are suggested. I was mad here that this did not make it into the Chat Assist feature for the phones, unfortunately.
The Samsung Notes app is getting a much-needed update too. With the new Note Assist feature under Galaxy AI, you can reformat your notes so that they look more organized and even ask your smartphone to summarize the notes with bullet points for a briefer preview.
Note Assist’s sidekick, Transcript Assist, helps you transcribe voice notes having up to twenty different speakers and even summarize and translate those voice recordings. Now, that is something nice to have for podcast creators or a business meeting.
As if that’s not enough, they have put AI into keyboards to make you sound smarter, more professional, and more socially likable (or maybe, unlikable) by asking generative texts to take over and magically compose your texts or replies to seem more up the mark or occassion. You simply type in using your keyboard and then choose how you want to make it sound — Chill, Excited, Lyrical, Formal, Shakespearean, or just rephrase the text.
That will be a huge hit among those overthinking heads who type and delete and then re-type a message multiple times over before hitting send.
2. Circle to Search with Google
Talk about show stealers and this will easily find its place among the Top 3 for 2024 for me and the year’s just got started. That’s how cool this feature is or will be when it lands on your phone.
Samsung partnered with Google to launch a new way of searching with Google. A step up for visual search. Nah, not opening Google Lens on your phone but bringing its power to your fingertips, anytime, anywhere. Long pressing the home button, while in any app, you activate this feature and then simply circle, highlight, scribble, or tap on it to search for it. And BOOM! Within seconds, you have a reasonable result on your screen without ever leaving that app.
Samsung showed this off in three different ways while being on someone’s Instagram Story. First, you could just circle the item of interest and search:
Or you could scribble on the item and try searching:
Or you could even tap on it and wait for the search results to pop up:
More interestingly, you could also circle or highlight within a text. The way they demoed this way is dope. So say you get a text from a friend talking about some restaurant/cafe near a landmark (but don’t remember its name). Just press the home button (to activate Circle to Search), highlight the text, and BOOM! You now know what restaurant your friend is talking about:
Hear me out, this feature is mind-blowing. The S24 Series would be the first ones to get this followed by other Androids. If Apple doesn’t have a good enough plan to integrate this with Google’s help on the iPhone (or make something similar for their devices), it’s going to hurt them badly.
Going ahead, it’s only going to get better and soon become a new normal for visual search on the internet.
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3. Photo Editing ft. Generative AI
Following in Google’s footsteps, Samsung has used Generative AI to make photo editing more powerful on their native photos app.
Using Generative fill, you can make a more tilted picture better as the AI fills in the gaps around the edges. You could also use it to remove an object/person or displace it from its original position in the image while the background is filled generatively using AI.
A cool implementation of this feature that they demoed was removing glares on glasses:
Taking it a step further, Samsung introduced Instant Slo-Mo. A normal video recording could be turned into a Slomo by just long pressing on the video. The Generative AI then proceeds to fill in the gaps by adding extra frames (up to 120, I hear) to turn it into a slow-motion video. Now that’s a cool feature there!
Samsung has also made it a point to feature which of the images in your photo library have used AI by watermarking the bottom left corner of the image.
And that’s a wrap for all the Galaxy AI features that caught my eye. There are a few more but I believe these are the ones that will truly change the way you use your smartphone in the coming years. And get ready to hear a lot more about them in the coming year because… now that’s a different section. Let’s discuss what going on inside these phones, a little bit.
Hardware Changes
This event felt like the start of an era where smartphone manufacturers will probably be focusing more on software features than hardware ones while launching their new product lines. I might be completely wrong about this too. What I can’t ignore is the fact that this year’s Android phones will feature a lot more AI-focused features because that’s what Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 promises.
Apart from the chipset, the outer chassis on the S24 Ultra model has a titanium finish and a flatter display than the previous generation of Ultras while the S24 and S24+ have retained aluminum bodies but squared-off edges like the Nothing Phones and iPhones.
Camera hardware has gotten a few updates from the previous generations too adding a new ProVisual Engine, which, once again, houses a bunch of AI-powered tools to improve image and video capturing. But I would bet my buck that most of the impressive ones come from the Galaxy AI features we discussed earlier.
Also, in case the news didn’t make it up to you — Samsung’s S24 series will be the first phone ever to allow you to upload HDR photos to Instagram directly using the in-app camera. This also goes for WhatsApp, Snapchat and TikTok. No more using the native camera app and then switching to other apps to upload them just for quality sake.
I feel Samsung has already done its share of hardware innovation for smartphones with foldables like the Z Flip and Z Fold series. Though the foldables do seem pricey at the moment, I believe they will only get cheaper and more powerful with time. It will be fun to see Galaxy AI integrated with the foldables — a true definition of power and compactness in one device. What say?
Conclusion
This year started on a great Note for Samsung (pun intended)!
All their collaborations have borne excellent results for them, in my opinion. Partnering with Google, they have managed to launch one of the best visual search engine features for their devices exclusively. This feature will be the talk of the town for a long time, assuming it delivers just as they demoed it.
I am impressed with the plethora of Galaxy AI features that came out. It seems to have overshadowed the meager hardware changes and maybe rightly so, that’s what Samsung wanted. A piece of recent news also covers the fact that these new Galaxy AI features will be free for the newly launched devices only until 2025-end following which their future would be uncertain and probably based around a subscription plan. Only time will tell.
I believe because of the new AI-focused chipset (the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3), we shall be hearing a lot more of such AI features during other smartphone launch events or developer conferences (like Apple’s WWDC). Also, did anyone notice Samsung sharing just the silhouette of a certain Galaxy Ring towards the end? It seemed to me like a teaser as the event ended giving absolutely zero information about its specs or price.
Guess we will just have to wait for this Galaxy Ring…
Anyways.
I can’t wait to try out Circle with Google on my phone someday soon but Call Assist seems like an instant life-saver for those vacationing days in Paris when you regret not taking your French Lessons seriously. What do you think? Which Galaxy AI feature blew your mind? My comment section awaits your reply. See ya there!
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Originally published on adiexplains.wordpress.com on January 20, 2024
