AI has pretty much taken over the world in the last few years, and Galaxy AI aims to put that power straight into the palm of your hand. Of course, not every feature will be useful to me. I can't remember a single time where I called someone who was speaking a different language, but other features are certainly getting me excited.
During the Samsung Unpacked 2024 livestream, the company finally opened the doors and unveiled Galaxy AI, it's own in-house answer to the rise of ChatGPT and other AI services, like Microsoft's Copilot. In a recent press release, Samsung has further detailed the uses of Galaxy AI, and they may seem exciting to some, but gimmicky for others.
The first feature is Live Translate, which as I mentioned prior, natively translates real-time phone calls. For those who may travel a lot, this will certainly be useful, but for someone who hasn't once left the country (I plan to, I promise), there isn't any time where I'd use this. At least, right now.
However, the similar AI feature of Interpreter will definitely make any face-to-face interactions with someone speaking a different language easier. In a split-screen view, Interpreter will work without Wi-Fi or mobile data, and will live-translate what you and the other person are saying into text, allowing you to easily understand each other.
Something I will certainly find useful in my daily life is Chat Assist. Hear me out first, but have you ever sent a text to someone and they took it the wrong way? I've had this issue countless times, and I'm almost 100% certain that you've had the problem at least once. Well, according to Samsung, Chat Assist will check your communication tones to make sure it isn't taken badly, which will be a lifesaver. That alone, almost makes me want to upgrade from the S23 Ultra to the S24U.
There's also the neat trick where you can circle objects to search for them via Google. It sounds pretty useful, although I imagine it will either be fairly niche or just a neat party trick. Google Lens hasn't done a great job at searching for random objects I have lying around, so I imagine that Circle to Search will fair similarly. However, it's definitely worth giving a shot.
For those of you who love to take photos, Galaxy AI has plenty of incredible features that will make your photography sessions a breeze. There's a host of things like upgraded Nightography, AI edit suggestions to make photos better, and "Generative Edit", which will fill in an image's background with AI.
There's a slight catch, at least for those of us outside of the US, China, and South Korea, the Galaxy S24 phones use Exynos instead of Snapdragon. Fortunately, only the S24 and S24+ use Exynos, with the Ultra receiving Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but Exynos chips have a history of performing poorly. Hopefully, the new Exynos 2400 perform better than prior chips from Samsung.
I'm currently using the Samsung S23 Ultra, and overall, I've been very impressed for the last year on how the premium handset performs. While I expect that the S24U will perform similarly, the Galaxy AI features almost tempt me into upgrading, despite feeling quite happy about my current smartphone prior to Samsung Unpacked.
Obviously, we'll have to see how Galaxy AI performs in real testing. Will it function well and be approachable, or will it cause problems for the average user? Hopefully the former. But Samsung is, so far, the only company to intrigue me with its AI offering, despite many of the best tech and gadgets in CES 2024 begging you to accept AI into your life. And that's a great thing.