During this week’s Unpacked event, Samsung introduced Galaxy AI, a suite of artificial intelligence tools designed for the new Galaxy S series smartphones — the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+, and Galaxy S24 Ultra. “AI amplifies nearly every experience on the Galaxy S24 series,” including real-time text and call translations, a powerful suite of creative tools in the ProVisual Engine and a new kind of “gestural search that lets users circle, highlight, scribble on or tap anything onscreen” to see related search results. The AI enhancements are largely enabled by a multiyear deal with Google and Qualcomm. Samsung also debuted a wearable accessory, the Galaxy Ring.

As a new Google Cloud partner, Samsung Electronics is the first company to deploy the Alphabet unit’s Imagen 2 text-to-image generator and the multimodal Gemini Pro LLM on Vertex AI to consumers worldwide and the first to provide real-time cloud access via smartphones to the models, according to a joint announcement by Samsung and Google.

The S24 series will also use Google’s lightweight Gemini Nano as an on-device LLM, delivered as part of the Android 14 operating system.

The partnership sees Samsung among the first to test Gemini Ultra for highly complex tasks. Gemini Pro on Vertex AI provides Galaxy users with critical Google Cloud security, safety, privacy and data compliance features, the companies say.

Though Samsung touted Galaxy AI in a separate press release for the S24 phones, it seems clear Galaxy AI is powered by Google. The new Circle to Search feature lets users “with a long press on the home button, circle, highlight, scribble on or tap anything on Galaxy S24’s screen” to see related search results.

“Tech giants are increasingly using AI to distinguish their devices from the pack and get consumers excited about upgrading their mobile devices in what has been a struggling smartphone market,” CNET reports. Samsung “is betting on generative AI to make its Galaxy S24 series stand out from other Android phones.”

“Built from the ground up to be multimodal, Gemini can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across, and combine different types of information including text, code, images, and video. Starting with Samsung-native applications, users can take advantage of the summarization feature across Notes, Voice Recorder, and Keyboard,” the release explains.

Available January 31, the Galaxy S24 series uses Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile chipset,” which Mashable says some benchmark tests have found to be faster than Apple’s M1.

The $1,300 S24 Ultra is 6.8 inches with a QHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X display, and “comes with four rear-facing cameras: a 12MP ultra-wide camera, a 200MP wide camera, a 50MP telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom, and a 10MP telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom,” writes Mashable, adding that “counting the 12MP front camera, the Galaxy S24 Ultra has a total of 5 cameras for users to choose from.”

Starting at $999, the Galaxy S24+ has the same QHD+ display as the Ultra, at 6.7 inches, while the $799 Galaxy S24 has a 6.2 inch FHD+ display. “Both smartphones have three rear cameras: a 12MP ultra-wide camera, a 50MP wide camera, and a 10MP telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom, as well as the 12MP front-facing camera,” per Mashable.

As for the Galaxy Ring, the Unpacked event included it in a closing teaser video that showed “what the device looked like, without any real details regarding its capabilities,” Mashable reports.