Samsung brings Galaxy AI to the Galaxy S24

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S24 family, its new high-end smartphones, on Wednesday, putting artificial intelligence front and center. Under the Galaxy AI brand, the phones offer real-time call translation, tools for summarizing notes and transcripts, visual search and generative photo editing.

The announcement matters less for any single feature than for its broader approach: Samsung wants AI to stop being an app people open occasionally and start playing a role in everyday phone tasks such as talking, writing, searching for information and touching up photos.

Translate a call without switching apps

The standout feature is Live Translate, which translates speech and text during a phone call. Each participant can speak their own language and receive the translation in theirs. Samsung says the feature runs on the device itself—a significant choice for private conversations, since the audio does not need to be sent to a server for translation.

There is also an Interpreter mode for face-to-face conversations. The phone displays the transcript and translation in a split-screen view, allowing two people sitting across from each other to read their respective sides.

Its real-world usefulness will depend on translation quality, particularly with accents, background noise, colloquialisms and fast-paced conversations. Even so, building the feature into the standard phone app removes one of the usual pain points of translators: having to switch between multiple apps while talking.

Write, summarize and transcribe on your phone

Galaxy AI includes Chat Assist, a tool for translating messages and suggesting different writing tones. The idea is that the same text can be reworked to sound more formal, more conversational or better suited to a professional setting.

In Samsung Notes, Note Assist can organize notes, generate summaries and apply formatting automatically. Transcript Assist, meanwhile, turns voice recordings into text, identifies speakers and provides summaries and translations. Specialized apps and language-model-based assistants already handled these tasks, but Samsung is putting them inside tools that come preinstalled.

These features do not replace human review when important information is involved. A summary can leave out nuance, and a transcript can mistake proper names or technical terms. Their value lies in saving the first round of mechanical work: turning a meeting or voice memo into a usable draft.

Circle to Search brings visual search to Android

The Galaxy S24 phones will be among the first to feature Circle to Search, a function developed with Google. By holding down the home button, users can circle, highlight or tap any item on the screen to search for it without leaving the app they are using.

For example, it can identify a piece of clothing in an image, find information about a landmark shown in a video or explain what an object is in a post. Visual search is not new, but the gesture cuts out several steps: there is no need to take a screenshot, open Google Lens and upload the image.

Google has announced that Circle to Search will also come to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro starting January 31. It shows how Android is becoming a distribution channel for AI features aimed at mass audiences, even as each manufacturer presents them through its own software layer.

Generative editing and a hybrid strategy

The gallery app includes Generative Edit, which lets users move, remove or resize elements in a photo and use AI to fill the resulting space. It is the same principle popularized by tools such as Google's Magic Eraser and Adobe's generative fill: the system invents plausible pixels to complete the scene.

Samsung distinguishes between features that run on the phone and those that use the cloud. This hybrid architecture makes it possible to keep more sensitive tasks, such as call translation, on the device while using servers for more demanding generation and editing operations. The company says Galaxy AI features will be free on compatible Galaxy devices through the end of 2025.

The lineup consists of the Galaxy S24, S24+ and S24 Ultra. In Spain, they start at €909, €1,159 and €1,479, respectively, and will be available on January 31. The S24 Ultra retains the most ambitious approach, with a titanium body, a 6.8-inch display and a 200-megapixel main camera.

Samsung has not presented Galaxy AI as a single chatbot-style assistant. Its approach is more fragmented, but perhaps easier to adopt: small aids built into tools that millions of people already use. The next challenge will be determining how many remain useful after the initial launch-day excitement wears off.