Samsung held its annual Unpacked occasion on January 17, 2024, to launch its new Galaxy S24 smartphone. The corporate rebranded the expertise (i.e., occasion) as “Galaxy AI” — a nod to placing extra AI, together with generative AI (genAI) capabilities into smartphones. This system kicked off with bulletins round experiences — not the {hardware} on the brand new system (e.g., cameras, display) — which isn’t a regular observe for Samsung. The 2024 Unpacked occasion might have been certainly one of my favorites of all time. I’ll share why.

The theme for the day targeted on utilizing AI to place the consumer on the heart of the smartphone expertise with a give attention to connection, creation, and collaboration. For me, the massive announcement of the day was the flexibility to run genAI on a smartphone and defend the consumer’s knowledge, images, notes, and extra. Please understand that many if not most so-called “genAI purposes” use greater than genAI to run — a number of different associated AI or ML applied sciences are within the combine. Samsung didn’t reveal these particulars. Right here’s what I used to be in a position to demo that excited me:

1. Language translation in close to actual time. By means of texting or speaking (speech-to-text), the Galaxy S24 will translate what one particular person is saying into certainly one of 13 languages, together with dialects (e.g., English because it sounds and is spoken in both India, the UK, or america). I had a easy dialog with a employees member who spoke Mexican Spanish whereas I spoke US English. It was not instantaneous, however it was quick sufficient to be efficient. The one mistake was one time saying “Jewish” fairly than “Julie” for my title.
2. Help of multimodal inputs to seek for info, questions, or procuring. Samsung partnered with Google to launch a brand new service known as “Circle to Search.” Customers can draw a circle with their finger or stylus pen to pick an object in a photograph and request extra info. Whereas there was a restricted gallery of images to make use of, I used to be impressed by the velocity and search outcomes. Some will argue that utilizing a picture as a search enter shouldn’t be new. Cathy Edwards, a VP of engineering at Google, spoke on the occasion and talked about that customers use Google Lens 12 billion instances every month.
3. Leveraging genAI to permit shoppers to edit, alter, or primarily create new pictures. The photograph modifying app permits customers to switch images. Samsung provides a watermark to the altered or newly created pictures. Think about you are taking an image of your good friend flying over a ski bounce at a resort. Your good friend may need gotten 5 inches off the bottom. Whereas your good friend might have felt like they have been flying, the photograph proof is much less spectacular. The consumer can repair that. They will choose the skier within the picture and transfer them within the photograph … let’s say one other 1–2 meters off the slope. The appliance will fill in across the moved skier to make the photograph look genuine. The app additionally affords some pre-baked choices to enhance images, similar to eradicating shadows or sharpening strains. (Whole apart: The smartphone may also flip movies filmed at full velocity into gradual movement.)
4. Summarizing group texts whereas doing the identical for notes — plus formatting them. Think about you might be in a gathering whereas your gross sales crew is planning an outing for a drink after work. Relatively than going again and studying by all of the textual content messages to catch up, you’ll be able to ask the service to summarize the dialog for you. The cellphone/service will do the identical (create summaries) for notes. It is going to additionally format the notes and provide different insights. These options are additionally out there for recorded voice memos.

On the finale, Samsung gave us a fast preview of what’s to come back subsequent, together with what seems to be to be an Oura-style ring. It was so quick that I needed to ask the lady sitting subsequent to me if I had imagined it.

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