AI: Samsung kicks off 2024 with 'Galaxy AI'

...the year of local AI devices gathers steam

At an Apple keynote styled ‘Samsung Galaxy Unpacked’ event in San Jose, California, the company barely mentioned the technical specs of the new phones. The focus was all on the AI software and features, much of it courtesy of its Android partner Google.

As I highlighted a week ago, 2024 is a year we’ll see “AI: Soon in all shapes and sizes”, as the AI Tech Wave kicks into second gear. Samsung kicked off its annual upgrades to its Galaxy smartphones with an AI festooned series of its Galaxy S24 smartphones. It includes the S24 Plus, and the flagship S24 Ultra, that all made up its ‘Galaxy AI’.

The WSJ made this trend clear in its headline: “Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Phones Go Heavy on Industry’s Next Big Hope: Generative AI”:

“Lots of industries are buzzing about generative artificial intelligence. Now it is the smartphone industry’s turn.”

“Samsung Electronics, the world’s No. 2 smartphone maker after Apple, unveiled its latest Galaxy S24 flagship devices on Wednesday, marking the industry’s largest-scale embrace of the new technology. The South Korean tech firm sells tens of millions of itsGalaxy S flagship phones globally every year.”

“Choi Won-Joon, who heads research and development for Samsung’s mobile business, said the company focused on delivering features it thought generative AI could help solve right now: overcoming language barriers, speeding up search and helping people obtain better photos. The new Galaxy S24 phones provide real-time translation of calls and text messages, improve imperfect photos and trigger searches on Google by encircling images and text on one’s phone.”

“The Galaxy S24’s new features, powered by both Samsung’s own generative AI engine and by long-running partner Google, aren’t the industry’s first. In recent months, Google’s own Pixel 8 smartphones, plus devices from several Chinese brands, have been rolled out with generative-AI abilities. “

The WSJ’s Joanna Stern had a good summary of the AI foot forward by Samsung and its partners like Google:

“Announced Wednesday and shipping at the end of this month, the trio of phones have the usual: sharper cameras, brighter displays and new colors. The $1,300 Ultra comes in a new titanium material. (Hmm, sounds familiar.)”

“Yet for the first time in a while, Samsung isn’t selling specs. It’s selling software.” 

“The South Korean company worked with Google and chip maker Qualcomm to weave generative-AI features—what it calls Galaxy AI—throughout the Android operating system and some apps. When you’re on a call, a voice speaking another language can be translated audibly in real time. When you type meeting notes and add documents to the Notes app, AI will summarize and organize them for you. In the Photos app, you can move around a subject and AI can regenerate the missing parts of the photo.”

It’s important this year especially because Apple took the lead in global smartphone shipments at Samsung’s expense in 2023:

“Apple led smartphone shipments in 2023, stripping Samsung of its long-held leading position in the market, the International Data Corporation (IDC) said Monday.”

“Preliminary data from the firm’s Worldwide Quarter Mobile Phone Tracker showed the iPhone maker made shipments of 234.6 million units last year. That marked a 3.7% year-over-year increase from 2022, when IDC reported 226.3 million shipments by the company.”

“Apple's iPhone shipments made up 20.1% of the global market in 2023, IDC said.”

As the WSJ’s Joanna Stern continues:

“At a time when smartphone shipments have stalled, Samsung expects AI to be a sales driver. And it isn’t just about selling new phones. In the first half of the year, it will begin rolling out some of these AI features to older phones, including the previous Galaxy S23 family. In addition, Samsung said it would provide the new models with longer software and security updates to help gadgets last longer.“

The details of the AI features of the Samsung S24 phones cover the gamut of so many things billions use their phones for everyday. From searching, to taking notes, to communicating via text and language, to of course taking photos. The WSJ does a good job highlighting the AI in these features this year:

“Keyboard: Yes, AI is even hiding inside your keyboard, and it goes beyond ducking autocorrect. Type your message, hit the AI button, select from options like “professional,” “casual” and “polite,” and the system will rewrite your message in that tone. An “emojify” option will—you guessed it—add appropriate emojis to the message.”

“Notes: Now this I’m really into. Hit the stars button in the Notes app, and AI can auto-format and summarize the messy notes you took during your hourlong meeting. You know, the one where you jotted everything down but didn’t really listen to what was said? A similar summarize tool is built into the web browser, too.”

“Photos: So your kid only jumped a foot high but he’d like it to look like 10 feet? Use the Generative Edit feature to move him up in the air and then create a new background where he was originally standing. Yeah, don’t trust anything you see anymore. Samsung says any photo edited with this feature will include a watermark in the bottom left of the image and in the metadata.”

“Anywhere: One of the neatest tricks: While in most apps, you can long-press on the home button at the bottom of the screen. It will bring up a Google search bar. Tap or circle something on the screen and it will automatically search for it. In a demo, we circled a wedding dress and it brought up, well, a lot of Google results of wedding dresses. This Google feature, called Circle to Search, is also coming to the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro.”

As Techcruch highilighted in a separate piece, Google is rolling out its AI powered "Circle to Search” feature in phones beyond Samsung:

“Alongside Samsung’s launch event today, Google announced a new way to search on Android phones dubbed “Circle to Search.” The feature will allow users to search from anywhere on their phone by using gestures like circling, highlighting, scribbling or tapping. The addition, Google explains, is designed to make it more natural to engage with Google Search at any time a question arises — like when watching a video, viewing a photo inside a social app or having a conversation with a friend over messaging, for example.”

As I’ve discussed earlier, Google is leveraging its next generation Foundation LLM AI technology Gemini Pro, in powering these features. As Techcrunch again elaborates:

“Gemini, Google’s cutting-edge generative AI model family, is coming to Samsung’s new flagship smartphone — the Galaxy S24. Google and Samsung made the announcement to coincide with the Galaxy S24’s unveiling this afternoon.”

“On Galaxy S24 phones, Gemini — specifically Gemini Pro, a mid-range model designed for a range of tasks — will power components of Samsung’s Notes, Voice Recorder and Keyboard apps, delivering what Google describes as “better summarization features.” Users will be able to, for instance, record a lecture using Voice Recorder and get a summary of the key parts of the lesson.”

“Meanwhile, Gemini Nano — a more efficient, compacter Gemini model — will enable a new feature in Google Messages, Magic Compose, which can craft messages in styles like “excited,” “formal” and “lyrical” on-device and without the need for an internet connection.”

“Worth noting is the fact that the Galaxy S24 is only the second Android device to run a Gemini Nano model after Google’s own Pixel 8 Pro. On the Pixel 8 Pro, Nano drives capabilities including an AI summarizer feature in the Recorder app and suggested replies in Google’s keyboard app Gboard.”

“Beyond Gemini, the Galaxy S24 will benefit from Google’s Imagen 2 text-to-image model, which will underpin photo editing features in the Galaxy S24 Gallery app. (Imagen 2 was unveiled at Google I/O last May and recently launched in preview on the web.) One, Generative Edit, can automatically fill in parts of images based on the surrounding context.”

“Google also said that Samsung will be one of the first partners to test Gemini Ultra, the largest and most capable Gemini model, before it’s made broadly available to developers and enterprises sometime this year.”

The reviews of these and other ‘AI features’ of the Samsung phones will be coming in the coming weeks. And the early impressions are already trickling in.

More broadly, Apple has already been adding AI capabilities into its hardware for over a year now, without much ‘AI’ fanfare.

We’re likely to see Apple’s responses to these smartphones with ‘AI/ML’ features later this year, more specifically at Apple’s annual Developer confab WWDC 2024 in June. And of course Apple’s launch of its next generation iPhones in the Fall with the iPhone 16 series. As we saw last year, Apple is more focused on bottom up ‘machine learning (ML)’ driven features first, and far less disposed to liberally mentioning ‘AI’ in its keynotes.

And of course Apple will get its own share of the media attention with the launch later this week of its Vision Pro headset platform.

And we will continue to see multimodal AI features springing up in all types of local devices beyond smartphones this year, from ‘Smart’ voice assistants like Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa/Echo, Google Nest, and of course new devices like Humane AI’s pins, the new Rabbit R1, and of course the much anticipated OpenAI/Sam Altman AI device venture with former Apple uber-designer Jony Ive.

If anything, Samsung is right about ‘Galaxy AI’, in a broader context. Complete with Google with its aptly named Gemini AI.

We as consumers, will have a wide and deep galaxy of AI products and services to pay attention to this year and beyond. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)