Samsung Unveils Line of Generative AI Smartphones

Samsung today announced a new series of smartphones with generative AI at the center, the first such line of mobile devices from the world's second largest smartphone maker.

The South Korean tech giant said it will be incorporating capabilities from Google’s Gemini large language model into its smartphones, beating Apple to the punch. The iPhone maker has been fairly mum on its generative AI plans.

Samsung S24 line of smartphones with generative AI

Samsung said it is the first to offer Gemini Pro and Imagen 2, Google DeepMind’s most advanced text-to-image model, on its newest Galaxy smartphones – the S24, S24 Plus and S24 Ultra.

Gemini is multimodal and can work with different data including text, code, images and video. Using Gemini, Samsung users can summarize content across Samsung-native apps, among other capabilities. Samsung said users can decide how much of their content they wish to share with the AI.

To be sure, AI has been in smartphones for years. It powers AI assistants such as Apple's Siri, among other features. But generative AI takes the smartphone a step further by letting AI co-create with users.

AI and generative AI features

Samsung and Google also announced a new way to search inside apps: by long-pressing the home button and then circling, highlighting, scribbling over or tapping the item of interest instead of leaving the app to search for it on a browser by entering text. The 'Circle to Search' feature works on images and videos. It is only available on Android phones.

Starting with the S24 line, Samsung will offer ‘Live Translate,’ which it said is a two-way, live voice and text translation capability on its native app. Its ‘Interpreter’ app instantly translates on a split-screen view so people across from each other can read translated texts.

‘Chat Assist’ can help users craft a text with the right tone, such as a polite message. Built into the keyboard, it also can translate texts in 13 languages.

With Imagen 2, Samsung users will get enhanced photo-editing capabilities. It also can be used to fill out the photo when there are gaps.

But these models will not be housed in the device; users will access them through Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform.

What will be on the device is Gemini Nano, which comes part and parcel with the Android 14 operating system.

Samsung also said it is the first Google Cloud customer to test Gemini Ultra, which it said is Google’s most capable and largest model yet. It did not say anything else about Google's rival to OpenAI's GPT-4.

Powering the S24 devices is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset for efficient AI processing and performance. Qualcomm said it is the company's most advanced chipset yet, designed specifically for generative AI.

Pre-orders for the S24 line of smartphones start today and shipping commences on Jan. 31. The S24 is priced starting at $799.99 with 128GB and 256GB options; the Plus starts at $999.99 with 256GB and 512GB options; and Ultra starts at $1,299.99 with storage choices of 256GB, 512GB and 1TB.

Customers who pre-order the S24 Ultra 512GB can upgrade to a 1TB model with no additional charge, if bought on Samsung.com. There is also a limited time $100 credit for pre-orders on the company website.