As if to show just how far it has come from the days when Galaxy S phones were all about hardware that only Samsung could manufacture, like huge and/or curved OLED screens, Circle to Search isn’t even Samsung’s software.

It’s made by Google, and will be coming to other Android phones, too. Samsung’s Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+ and S24 Ultra, the three models in this year’s line-up, are simply the first Android phones to get the lightning-fast search feature, Samsung officials said.

But other, AI-related enhancements to the new phones are Samsung’s own handiwork, and are the products of R&D the company has been doing in artificial intelligence since 2017, when the company first set up its AI research centre, said Eric Chou, the director of Mobile Experience at Samsung Australia.

“We’ve been talking about AI and machine learning for many years. It’s just we are now packaging it all up and allowing consumers to experience it in a way that will benefit customers,” he told The Australian Financial Review.

“Samsung has been pioneering hardware for a long time, and now we are marrying (that) hardware with AI services. It helps the device to be a lot more personal, but it also helps customers get a lot more done.”

The new AI features are based around Samsung’s large language model (LLM), known as Gauss, which the company only announced last November, and which consists of three models that respectively generate text, software code and images, Samsung said at the time.

As with the Gemini LLM which Google controversially introduced last year for its own Pixel 8 Pro phone, the Gauss model will have a smaller version which runs directly on a Samsung phone, and a larger version which will run on Samsung’s cloud services, Mr Chou said.

Using only the local Gauss LLM, users of the Galaxy S24 will be able to do live language translations of phone calls, where the AI model listens to the caller’s voice, translates whatever was said into another language, and then reads that translation using an AI-generated voice to the listener, repeating that process in reverse when the listener speaks.

Another, similar feature in the new phones will let people do live language translations of in-person conversions, without any of the conversion ever leaving the phone.

That minimises the delays in the translations, and obviates privacy concerns that could arise when people have confidential conversations that need translation, Mr Chou said.

Meanwhile, AI-based photo editing features in the new phones will use the more powerful LLM in the cloud to perform tasks like selecting a person or item in a photo, and then resizing and moving the selection to another part of the photo.

The hole in the photo, left behind where that person or item was originally located, gets filled in using the Samsung Gauss image generator in the cloud.

Mr Chou said that because not everyone is happy about using generative AI, and because not everyone is happy about sending their data or images to the cloud for processing by an AI, users will be able to turn all the AI features on or off, and specify whether services should use only the local LLM, or also take advantage of the cloud LLM.

Another generative AI feature in the Galaxy S24, known as Chat Assist, generates suggestions for autocompleting short messages, in different tones depending on the audience. Captions destined for social media platforms like Instagram will be light and catchy, whereas chat messages generated for bosses or co-workers will have a more formal tone, Samsung officials said.

Exactly which older Samsung phones get retrofitted with which new AI feature will be determined by the speed of the older phones, Mr Chau said.

Like Google’s Gemini Nano, the Samsung Gauss LLM needs to run on the phone’s “neural processing unit” (NPU) – a silicon chip dedicated to running AI-related tasks – and the new AI services will only appear on old phones with NPUs powerful enough to run Gauss effectively, he said.

The new phones aren’t entirely about generative AI, of course.

New camera features

For photographer’s, there’s a new 50 megapixel 5x telephoto camera, replacing the 12 megapixel 10x telephoto camera on last year’s model.

Samsung discovered that users prefer telephoto lenses with 3x or 5x magnification, rather than the more powerful 10x magnification, and so they removed the 10x camera that appeared on the Galaxy S23 and replaced it with one that has a shorter lens but a more powerful image sensor that can still do high-quality 10x image magnification if needs be, officials said.

And for gamers, the new models have a faster processor, as well as a bigger cooling system that lets the processor run faster, longer, before it has to be slowed down to prevent overheating.

The phones go on sale February 7, with pre-orders starting now.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra, which features a 6.8-inch display and electronic stylus and replaces the old Galaxy Note phones, starts at $2199 for the model with 256 GB of storage. The Galaxy S24+, which features a 6.7-inch display, starts at $1699 for the 256 GB model, and the basic Galaxy S24, which has a 6.2-inch display, starts at $1399 for the 256 GB model.

John Davidson is in San Jose for the launch of the Galaxy S24 as a guest of Samsung