Samsung Electronics Co on Wednesday announced its latest Galaxy smartphones with new artificial intelligence (AI) features as the South Korean giant seeks to win back its spot as the world’s biggest phone seller from Apple Inc.
“Artificial Intelligence will bring about great change in the mobile industry,” Samsung president T.M. Roh said as he launched an event in a sports center in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose, California.
Mobile devices are to become the primary access points for AI, with Samsung aiming to be a leader on that path, Roh added.
Photo: Bloomberg
The premium S24 Ultra smartphone unveiled at the event is said to be able to interpret foreign language phone calls and translate texts in real time.
A Samsung executive likened it to having an interpreter taking part in multilingual phone calls.
Available in 13 languages, the on-device function is powered by Samsung’s own AI technology.
Through a partnership with Google, which makes the smartphone’s Android operating system, the S24 also offers an unprecedented search function, which, also using AI, allows users to simply circle a phrase or image they want to search.
The feature eliminates the need to juggle between apps for searches with meddlesome cut-and-pasting, the company said.
Messaging and car system features such as navigation are also augmented with AI to either recommend responses or tend to tasks while allowing drivers to focus on the road, it said.
AI also enhances the phone’s camera powers, with generative AI helping to fill in or remove backgrounds, it added.
Similar AI features are widely rumored to be a part of Apple’s next iPhone 16, likely to be released later this year.
The Galaxy S24 series is to begin shipping on Jan. 31 with the top-of-the-line Ultra starting at US$1,299.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
RSS