Tech giant Samsung announced an "AI agent" would play a leading role in its upcoming flagship smartphone range in software created with Google and revealed in San Jose on Thursday morning, Australian time.
The announcement is likely to spark a fresh battle for AI smartphone superiority, an analyst said, as technology companies compete for the most advanced and useful next-generation tools.
Galaxy S25 devices will feature Google's AI voice assistant Gemini, working across all apps. (Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson/AAP PHOTOS)
Samsung's latest devices come one year after the company became the first to launch AI features in smartphones but it will take a different approach in 2025 thanks to a closer collaboration with Google.
The company's Galaxy S25 devices will feature Google's AI voice assistant Gemini, which will be designed to work as an "AI agent" across the phone's native and third-party apps, Samsung Australia mobile vice-president Eric Chou said.
"When we first launched Galaxy AI, it was very much about AI features you still had to go and search for," he told AAP.
"The approach we're taking in 2025 is that it's personal, it's intuitive, you're able to interact with AI in different ways given that it has been fully integrated as an agent into the device."
Google's Gemini, which will replace Bixby as the default voice assistant in Samsung phones, will work as a "multi-modal agent," Mr Chou said, so users could ask it to perform multiple tasks with one prompt, such as finding a specific restaurant and adding details to a calendar.
Other AI features on the smartphones include Call Transcript to convert phone conversations to text. (Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson/AAP PHOTOS)
AI agents have been widely tipped as the next evolution of generative AI and their use in smartphones, Mr Chou said, made the most sense.
"'AI agent' is a big industry term that's being bantered around," he said.
"For us, it's really about building an AI platform for the future but also allowing for that humanisation and personalisation so that the device is there to serve you as opposed to the other way around."
Other AI features added to the smartphones, due in Australia on February 14, will include Call Transcript to convert phone conversations to text, Now Brief to proactively show sports scores or traffic information and Audio Eraser to remove or boost sound within videos.
Hardware additions to the phones, which will start at $1399, will include a faster Snapdragon processor to handle AI demands and, in the $2149 Ultra model, a 50-megapixel ultra wide camera sensor, up from 12 megapixels.
Galaxy S25 smartphones "could be the first real, clear challenge that Apple faces going into 2025". (Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson/AAP PHOTOS)
AI smartphone features have become a significant purchase consideration for consumers after a year of prominent launches, Telsyte managing director Foad Fadaghi said, and Samsung's partnership with Google could give it an edge over its major rival.
"This could be the first real, clear challenge that Apple faces going into 2025 in that its AI technology has not had the same investment that Gemini has had," he said.
"We could be at a pivotal point where Samsung has a unique application that might turn some heads for those in the Apple ecosystem."
It may take more to convince some Apple loyalists to switch, Mr Fadaghi said, but Samsung's move was likely to guarantee further AI advances in both camps.
(AAP travelled to San Jose with the assistance of Samsung).
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