Samsung
may have lost its position as the world’s largest smartphone seller to
Apple,
but the South Korean electronics company is now raising the stakes.
On Wednesday, Samsung launched a phone that arguably surpasses the capabilities of Apple’s current top iPhones. Among other features, it adds generative artificial intelligence capabilities, which will raise the pressure on Apple to include more AI features in the next iPhone.
That version, the iPhone 16, isn’t expected to arrive until this fall.
The new Samsung phone is the Galaxy S24 Ultra, which comes with a suite of software called Galaxy AI. It has hardware improvements over the previous generation: a brighter screen, longer battery life, and a new
Qualcomm
processor called the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 that adds new neural processing capabilities required for on-device AI software.
But what make the phone interesting are its AI features.
Here are a few examples:
- “Circle to search” gives users a new way to do image searches in Google. Using the phone’s stylus to circle any element in a still image or video, including in YouTube, provides an easy way to figure out more information about a piece of clothing, a plant, animal, or other object.
- A live translation feature can translate text or voice conversations on the phone between languages in real time, with initial availability in 13 languages, including English, Korean, Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Thai, and Vietnamese. Among other things, users can make calls, or receive them, and have the voices auto-translate to the language that makes sense to each speaker.
- Note Assist allows for instant summarization of text notes. The summarization feature also works with the phone’s voice recorder.
- Another feature, Generative Edit, includes new photo editing features, like the ability to move objects around in an image, or to remove things or people from a picture.
- Chat Assist will provide real-time suggestions to make text messages sound more professional or more conversational.
In a separate announcement, Google and Samsung said that the S24 line will be the first smartphones with access to Google’s cloud-based Gemini Pro large language model, as well as its Imagen 2 text-to-image capability, which powers new photo-editing features. The phone will also include Gemini Nano, an on-device large language model included in the Android 14 operating system software, for some AI tasks that don’t need to be processed in the cloud.
The unlocked version of the phone with 512 gigabytes of storage is available at $1,299.99.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
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