Samsung is ushering in a new era of artificial intelligence (AI) with its S24 series. Comprising S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra, this flagship series will be equipped with Samsung’s new, proprietary Galaxy AI.
At a media briefing, we were given an exclusive look into just what these phones are capable of.
A suite of AI tools
1. Live call translations
In a bid to foster greater connections, one big issue that Galaxy AI is tackling is language barriers.
Calls on the S24 phones will get to enjoy two-way, real-time translations. This feature works online and offline, meaning no internet is required to get an AI interpreter on the call.
During the demo session, we got to witness how this feature works. The call was conducted with a Galaxy S24 device and an old Nokia phone to illustrate that the feature works across different receivers, not just other Samsung Galaxy S24 users.
How it works is that the caller can set the language each person is speaking and what language to translate into. The translated audio will audibly play, but there’ll also be a written transcript showing what words are being detected and translated.
Since the translated audio does overlap with the speaker’s voice, the caller can choose to mute their real voices so the recipient only hears the AI-translated voice. There are two kinds of voices supported currently—a male one, and a female one.
There’s no language auto-detect feature yet for the calls, but users can assign a language to everyone in their contacts to streamline the translation process.
While there were a few translation errors, the call actually went rather smoothly, and the callers were able to hold a conversation, even with one speaking English and the other Korean.
Note that these translations are done using Samsung’s own proprietary systems, not Google Translate.
So far, the languages supported are quite limited. Out of the 17 languages supported, the only two Southeast Asian languages supported are Thai and Vietnamese, so we’ll have to wait and see about Bahasa Malaysia translations. Mandarin is currently supported, but not other Chinese dialects.
2. Text translations
Of course, live calls aside, texts can now easily be translated with Galaxy AI too. Users can translate their messages while typing, and also show translations for the whole text thread.
Similar to the live call translations, only a limited number of languages is supported for now.
This feature is supported on third-party apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Line, and more. Apps like WeChat and Telegram are not supported, though.
Aside from chat messages, Samsung Internet, its built-in browser, also supports translations too.
3. Tone tweak
Another cool text-related feature is the Tone Tweak. Tone Tweak is a feature that lets you change the tone of your message to something more appropriate.
Some of the tones available include polite, casual, professional, hashtags, and Emojify.
4. Notes assist
Aside from converting written notes to text, the S24 series now also has features to help with auto-formatting as well as grammar and spell checks. For long blocks of texts, summaries can be easily created here too.
The tone tweak mentioned earlier can also be used with Samsung Notes.
5. Voice recording transcription
Previously, Samsung has already supported a speech-to-text mode on its voice recorder, which could convert up to ten minutes of speech into written notes.
This has been majorly upgraded with the S24 series and Galaxy AI. We weren’t able to test this feature out during the demo session, but certainly look forward to it, especially as we often conduct and record interviews.
6. Circle to search
If you’re a user of Google Lens, you might have a bunch of random, redundant screenshots you took on your phone, taken just so you can look up something in the image.
The new Circle to Search function developed by Samsung and Google will get rid of that problem.
As its name suggests, Circle to Search lets users circle just about anything on the phone screen, which will then be searched on Google. Just hold down the home button until the option pops up.
Camera and post-processing
The Galaxy S24 Ultra will feature a quad-telephoto system, with multi-frame processing to really max out on the zoom quality. The zoom is said to have been improved for Nightography especially.
Personally, an exciting feature for me is that users of the S24 series phones can already see the Super HDR take effect from the preview (i.e. when taking images), instead of having it kick in after the image is taken to better show real-time results.
As for specs, the S24 Ultra will have a 200MP wide camera, 50MP ultra wide camera, and 10MP for both its telephoto cameras. The front camera is 12MP.
But the photography and videography aside, it might just be the post-processing that’s gotten the biggest facelift.
Leveraging AI, generative fill is now possible. This means you can easily adjust the tilt of an image without cropping said image, or remove objects from images and have the empty space filled out automatically.
Other editing features include the removal of shadows and reflections. These all require the internet to work, though.
Another interesting feature is that when viewing a video, users can now long press to slow it down. This doesn’t create a new, slo-mo video, but just allows you to better view the video and spot the exact frame you’re looking for.
Gaming, display, and design
Introduced in the S23 series, the S24 phones will also support ray tracing. Its cooling system has even further improved from its predecessor, now 1.9 times bigger than in the S23. Keep in mind, the S23’s cooling system was already 2.7 times larger than the S22.
As for the processor, the Galaxy S24 Ultra will be fitted with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, while the S24 and S24+ will come with the Exynos 2400.
Another notable upgrade for the phone is that its peak brightness is now 2,600 nits making it Samsung’s brightest display ever. The S23 phones had boasted a peak brightness of 1,750 nits.
There’s also a new Corning Gorilla Armor screen that’ll make this phone four-times tougher than before. The screen also claims to have 75% reduced reflections.
The S24 series will also include the first-ever Samsung phone with a titanium body for its Ultra variant.
Overall, the S24 phones are visually similar to the S23s with the one-mass design, though this time featuring even thinner bezels.
With these software and hardware upgrades, we’re excited to get our hands on the S24 and experience how Samsung is approaching the AI frontier.
- Read other articles we’ve written about Samsung here.
