Learning Design Workshop (Gambia): Samsung Galaxy S24: the AI we're building makes you more human

Ultra pen-equipped is this year's hero, with the help of "Circle to Search" that lets you search Google without leaving apps

Samsung made artificial intelligence the centerpiece of its annual high-end phone launch and presented its Galaxy Ultra, the successor to the Galaxy Note, as the hero of the day.

There's nothing amazingly new about the Galaxy S 24 series. As in previous years, Samsung has a base model, a Plus model that's slightly larger, and an Ultra that's equipped with an S-Pen stylus. They are all rectangular prisms with touch screens, cameras

The Ultra was the hero of Samsung's infomercial and online promotions, despite its $1,299/£1,249/€1,589/AUD$2,199 price tag, much more than the other two models, as we'll detail below.

Samsung led these promotions by showing off real-time voice translation, a feature made possible by AI (Google's Gemini models, to be exact). The reason for introducing the Ultra was made clear in Samsung's second demo: tools that use artificial intelligence to sort handwriting entered with your S-Pen or jot down notes taken with the machine. Samsung's voice recording app also uses AI to summarize recordings.