• As teased, Samsung has unveiled its new S24 series which feature Galaxy AI.
• One of the leading new features is Circle to Search, which is powered by Google.
• Samsung plans to make these new features backwards compatible on a handful of previous generations of smartphone.

Samsung has officially unveiled its latest flagship phones to the world, and in the lead up to the debut of the new S24 series, the South Korean firm has teased the impending arrival of Galaxy AI.

Now that it is here, what is Galaxy AI and what can it do on the S24 series?

First it is worth noting that the feature set is currently available across the S24 series, with all three new models supporting the AI-powered functionality. Added to this is the fact that much of the behind the scenes work is accomplished thanks to a deepening of the relationship between Samsung and Google, with some of the features powered by the latter.

As for the features of Galaxy AI, speaking to Samsung’s local leadership, while more features could have been baked in, it was important to ensure that the experience was consistent and delivered the best possible interface.

This is especially important as Samsung is clearly using the launch of the S24 series as a marker for its ambitions with on-device AI, wanting to be the first Android phone maker to bring the technology to the fore on its flagship mobile products in 2024 before anyone else.

Back to the features themselves, and one of the most notable is Circle to Search. As the name implies, users can user their finger or an S Pen stylus to draw a circle around almost any on-screen object in order to find out more about it, whether it be wanting more information or perhaps where to purchase.

It looks and feels a lot like Google Lens, although the key difference here is that the feature is not limited to what you browse via Chrome, and it can be spun up in almost all of the native Samsung apps on the S24.

Next are a range of text and voice-based assistant functions. Here the S24 series can facilitate Live Translate, Chat Assist, Transcript Assist, and Note Assist.

Starting with Live Translate, which can be fired up during voice and video calls to do live translations on-device with people who speak another language.

Translations appear as text within the calling app, and at the time of writing 13 languages are supported and accessed by downloading language packs to the device. We spoke with Samsung South Africa who noted that no local languages are supported for now, but discussions are already under way to add some down the line.

Shifting to Chat Assist it provides real-time text translation and is supported via the native Samsung keyboard on-device alone, once again for the aforementioned 13 languages at present.

Transcript and Note Assist are able to read through and summarise online documents and notes, and are supported only in the Samsung web browser and note app respectively for now.

The final set of features are all photo/video focused, with the Galaxy AI capable of both automatically suggesting edits to an image in your camera roll, as well as make use of Generative AI Edit to add or remove whole elements from an image. The latter is particularly useful in removing shadows or objects and generating content to fill the space.

On the video side, a new Instant Slow-Mo video function is present, and is capable of slowing down a video at any point by simply pressing and holding on the screen, with a handful of different frame rate options available and the feature working with any video that is present in the library and not having to be recorded with an S24 device alone.