I’ve never considered Samsung a software company, let alone a name to watch in the AI race. But with the launch of the Galaxy S24 series today, the company is eager for us to connect it to this year’s hottest tech trend. The new flagship phone looks essentially the same as last year’s model, but things are changing under the hood. During a hands-on session during CES 2024 in Las Vegas last week, I was more focused on checking out the new software on the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus.
Thanks to the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor “made for Galaxy” (in the US), the S24 series is capable of performing some new AI tasks that look very familiar. In fact, if you’ve used Microsoft’s CoPilot, Google’s Bard AI, or ChatGPT, many of these tools won’t feel new.What yes What’s new is that they appear on the S24, and are mostly handled on-device by Samsung’s recently announced Gaussian Generative AI model, which it’s been quietly building.
Samsung Galaxy AI features on S24
There are five main areas where generative AI plays a huge role in the Galaxy S24 series – search, translation, note creation, message composition, and photo editing and processing. Aside from the note-taking and composition features, most of the updates appear to be versions of existing Google products. In fact, the new Circle to Search feature is a Google service that will debut on the S24 series in addition to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro.
Circle search
With Circle Search, you just press the middle of the bottom edge of your screen, and the Google logo and search bar pop up, and you can draw a circle around anything on your display. Well, almost anything. DRM content or screenshot-protected content (such as banking apps) is prohibited. Once you make your selection, a panel slides up to display your selection along with results from the Google Search Generation Experience (SGE).
You can scroll down to see image matches, followed by shopping, text, website, and other types of listings that SGE deems relevant. I circled pictures of Samsung clock gadgets, beef wellingtons, and lemons, and I got pretty accurate results every time. I’m impressed how quickly Google correctly identified the grill I circled in an Engadget article about Weber Seawood, especially since the picture I drew was slanted.
This is basically an image search via Google or Lens, except it saves you from having to open another app (and take a screenshot). You’ll be able to circle items in YouTube videos, friends’ Instagram stories (or, let’s be honest, ads). While I’m interested in the feature and its accuracy, I’m not sure how often I’ll use it in the real world. Whether you use gesture-based navigation or a three-button layout, long-pressing the gesture to launch Circle Search works. The latter can be a little confusing since you almost have your finger pressed down on the home button, but not quite.
Circle to Search will launch on January 31, and while it’s currently only available on the Galaxy S24s and Pixel 8s, it’s unclear whether older devices will get the feature.
Chat assistant can adjust the tone of messages
The rest of Samsung’s AI capabilities are actually powered by the company’s own language models, not Google’s. This part deserves clarification, because when you use the S24 to translate messages from Portuguese to Mandarin, you’ll be using Samsung’s database, not Google’s. I really just hope you direct your anger at the right target when things inevitably go wrong.
I will say that when I first heard about Samsung’s new chat accessibility feature, I was a little concerned. It uses generative artificial intelligence to help rewrite the messages you write to change the tone. Let’s say you’re in a hurry and you’re replying to a friend, and you know he might be anxious and misinterpret the text. S24 can take your sentence like “I’m back now, what do you need” and make it less stiff. The options I saw were “Casual,” “Emoji,” “Polite,” “Professional,” and “Social,” which is a tag-filled title presumably for your social media posts.
I typed “Hey there. Where can I get some delicious barbecue? And how are you doing?” Then I clicked on the AI icon above the keyboard and selected the “Writing Style” option. After about a second or two, the system returned a variation of what I had written.
The top result is my original version, followed by the pro version, which I honestly find pretty funny. It reads “Hello, I would like to inquire about any delicious barbecue options nearby. Also, I hope you receive this message successfully. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
This reminds me of a fragment friends Joey sounds smarter using thesaurus. Samsung’s artificial intelligence seems to simply replace each single word with a slightly larger word, while also adding some formal greetings. I don’t think “asking if there are any delicious BBQ options nearby” is anything a human being would write.
That said, the random choice is a pretty valid rephrasing of what I wrote, as is the polite version. I can’t imagine a situation where I would choose the “emoji” option, unless it was for novelty. While the social options are painful for me to read, at least the hashtags #Foodie and #BBQLover seem appropriate.
Samsung Translator
You can also use Samsung’s artificial intelligence to instantly translate messages into one of 13 languages, which is very similar to the feature Google launched on the Pixel 6 in 2021. The S24’s interface also looks reminiscent of the Pixel’s, with both offering text input fields in two languages. Like Google, Samsung has a field at the top for you to select the target language, although the system automatically recognizes the language used. I’ve never gotten it to work properly in a foreign language I could understand, and there’s no real way to confirm the S24’s accuracy in Portuguese.
Samsung’s translation engine is also used for a new feature called Instant Translate, which basically acts as your interpreter when making calls through the native dialer app. I tried calling one of several actors on standby at Samsung, pretending to be the manager of a foreign-speaking hotel or restaurant. After I dialed the number and turned on the “instant translation” option, Samsung’s artificial intelligence read a brief disclaimer, explaining to the “manager of the Spanish restaurant” that I was using a computer system to translate. Then, when I said “Hello,” a few seconds later I heard a disembodied voice say “Hola.”
The delay was so severe that it disrupted the rhythm of my presentation because the person on the other end of the phone clearly understood English and was answering in Spanish before my translated request was sent. So instead of:
Me: Can I make an appointment?
S24: …can I make an appointment?
Restaurant: Yes, how many people and what time?
S24 (to me): …yes, how many people and what time?
My demo is actually:
Me: Can I make an appointment?
pause
Restaurant: Yes, how many people and what time?
S24: Can I make an appointment?
pause
S24 (to me): Yes, how many people and what time?
This is a bit confusing.I think this represents all Instantly translate real-world calls? No, but if Samsung wants to help and not cause chaos, it needs to work on reducing lag.
Galaxy AI rearranges your notes
What fascinates me the most is the power of Samsung’s artificial intelligence in its Notes app, which historically has had some impressive handwriting recognition and indexing capabilities. With the help of artificial intelligence, you can quickly reformat large blocks of text into easy-to-read headings, paragraphs, and bullet points. You can also swipe sideways to view different themes with various colors and font styles.
Annotations can also generate summaries for you, although most summaries on the demo unit don’t look very smart or coherent. The first section is aptly named “Introduction” after it automatically formats a note titled “Exploration of Solar System Objects,” but confusingly the first bullet point below is “Solar System.” The second bullet point is a two-sentence sentence that begins with “The solar system is filled with a series of celestial bodies.”
Samsung also borrowed another feature from the Pixel ecosystem, using its speech-to-text software to transcribe, summarize and translate recordings. The transcription of my short monologue was accurate enough, but the speaker tags were not. The transcribed excerpts are similar to those in the notes in that they are not entirely my personal emphasis.
This is already a lot of content and I haven’t even gotten to the photo editing updates yet. My colleague Sam Rutherford details his hands-on experience with the Galaxy S24 Ultra, which has a more advanced camera system. In a nutshell, Samsung offers editing suggestions, generated background fills, and an instant slow-motion tool that fills in frames when you choose to slow down the movie.
Samsung Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus hardware update
This brings me to hardware. On the regular Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus, you get a 50MP main sensor, a 12MP wide-angle camera, and a 10MP telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom. On the front is a 12MP selfie camera. So basically the same setup as last year. The S24 is equipped with a 6.2-inch Full HD+ screen, while the S24 Plus is equipped with a 6.7-inch Quad HD+ panel, both of which offer adaptive refresh rates from 1 to 120Hz. In the US, all three S24 models use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor available in Galaxy, with the base S24 starting with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Both the S24 and S24 Plus have slightly larger batteries than their predecessors, with 4,000mAh and 4,900mAh batteries respectively, which are 100mAh and 200mAh larger than before.
While the S24 looks very similar to last year’s S23, my first thought when I saw them was how much like the iPhone they look. This is neither a compliment nor an accusation. To be clear, I’m only talking about the S24 and S24 Plus, not the Ultra, which still has the Note’s unique look.
It feels like Samsung spent so much time upgrading its software and focusing on joining the artificial intelligence race this year that it completely ignored the design of the S24. Also, unlike the latest iPhones, the S24 also lacks support for the newer Qi 2 wireless charging standard, which includes magnetic support, known as Apple’s MagSafe.
wrap up
I know it’s just marketing speak and an empty slogan, but I’m very opposed to Samsung using something it thinks is popular to attract people. Don’t forget, this is the company that ran an “Awesome Unpacked” event in 2021 that was filled with embarrassing moments and embarrassing use of words like “squad” and “iconic.”
That doesn’t mean everything Samsung has done with the Galaxy S24 series is completely pointless. Some of these features may actually be useful, such as summarizing a transcription or translating a foreign language message. But after seeing the company follow one trend after another (such as launching Bixby after the rise of digital assistants, or following the Chinese phone maker in bringing scene optimizers to its camera app), launching a generative AI feature feels very familiar. . Putting aside my penchant for Samsung’s #trendy #hashtags, the bigger issue here is that if the company simply jumps on fads rather than actually thoughtfully developing meaningful features, consumers risk losing interest in the future. Tool support. Just look at what happened to Bixby.
This article was originally published on Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/galaxy-s24-and-s24-plus-hands-on-samsungs-ai-phones-are-here-but-with-mixed-results-180008236. html?src=rss
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