The much-publicised ‘Galaxy Unpacked’ event where Samsung had promised to unveil ‘a new era of phone’ took place yesterday at San Jose, and, yes, it was packed with a lot of ‘AI.’ While the event was all about Samsung, the true protagonist was another big tech company without whom the AI capabilities that the phone manufacturer is betting big on would not have happened. In comes, Google.  

Unveiling its new brand of Galaxy S24 series, namely, Samsung Galaxy S24, S24 Plus, and the S24 Ultra, the company’s focus was on showcasing all new AI capabilities on the smartphones calling it Galaxy AI. However, the integration of Google’s advanced AI-features on the phones took the limelight. 

Google All The Way

When Samsung teased the sparkles Samsung Galaxy AI logo, its uncanny resemblance to Google Bard’s logo drew everyone’s attention. At the Galaxy AI event, the suspicion became clear when the company announced the latest AI-enabled features of Google on the new smartphone. Almost all the new features announced in the S24 series were powered by Google.

The new ‘Circle to Search’ feature was separately but simultaneously announced by Google and Samsung. The new feature will enable users to draw a circle around any object in an image or video, and get AI-powered information from Google. With a simple gesture, a user can search for anything without switching apps. Live Translate, is another feature where the integrated AI model will provide real-time voice/text translation during calls in the native phone app. 

While the new AI-enabled features sound impressive, the biggest announcement is the integration of Gemini on Samsung phones. 

Gemini to See the Light of the Day

Google Gemini, which is considered to be Google’s most capable and advanced multimodal AI-model, that was released last month, will be integrated on the Galaxy S24 phones. The series will have built-in Gemini Nano, which is an optimised model for on-device tasks. 

Furthermore, Samsung will be the first Google Cloud partner to deploy Gemini Pro, which is Google’s AI model for a wide range of tasks, and Imagen 2, which is Google’s advanced text-to-image diffusion technology, on Vertex AI. Samsung phone applications such as Notes, Voice Recorder and Keyboard apps will utilise Gemini Pro for summarization features. 

Samsung will also be one of the first customers to test Gemini Ultra which is the most capable and largest AI model for highly complex tasks. Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, considers the Samsung-Google Cloud partnership as a ‘tremendous opportunity for generative AI to create meaningful mobile experiences.’ With Gemini, Samsung smartphones can leverage Google Cloud’s infrastructure and advanced AI capabilities. 

Samsung’s Diversified Partnerships

CES 2024 – Samsung Keynote Speech. Source: The Verge

Samsung’s strong collaboration with Google will help power their devices with the latest AI-enabled features, however, that has not limited the smartphone maker to tie-up with other big tech giants. 

At the latest CES 2024 that concluded last week, where Samsung revealed new devices, the company announced its strategic partnership with Microsoft to bring Copilot features. Microsoft Copilot capabilities are set to arrive in Galaxy phones in March. 

Furthermore, the company also said that the Galaxy smartphone camera can be used as a webcam on a PC. The webcam support will allow the usage of both front and rear facing cameras and enable users to apply background blur and other customisations that are allowed in video calls.

With the recent release of Copilot Pro, which offers a number of AI-enabled features, Samsung’s partnership with Microsoft on one side, and Google on the other, is only enabling the company to experience the best of both the worlds.  

Tweet by co-founder and CTO of Lattice Labs. Source: X

The Android Upgrade 

With a number of AI-enabled features, powered by Google, another big development from the house of Google is in the OS segment. Samsung phones will now receive seven years of security updates and seven generations of OS upgrades starting with the S24 series. 

This comes as a significant upgrade from a previous announcement on android upgrade, where in early 2022, Samsung had announced four generations of Android OS upgrades and five years of security updates starting with S21 series. 

Interestingly, Google had also announced seven years of software updates for their latest Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones that were released in October last year. With Samsung also announcing the same, the competition in the Android smartphone market will still continue between both companies. 

However, with the large market share that Samsung and Apple already has in the smartphone market, Google’s Pixel share is hardly a number. It is evident that in spite of being in the phone market, Google’s AI-models for smartphones are not solely for their customers. Tapping into the large Android phone makers’ market, Google’s AI offering is only going to be a win for the company. 

Considering how Google is providing Gemini in exclusivity (barring Pixel) for Samsung S24 series, the collaboration might have involved huge finances as well. However, Samsung will desperately look to reap benefits from the S24 series collaboration with Google, owing to recently losing its market dominance to Apple by 0.6% market share.