Owners of recent Galaxy flagships are about to get a big upgrade, as the Galaxy AI features that debuted with this year's Galaxy S24 lineup roll out to select phones starting this week.
Samsung says the One UI 6.1 update it had promised back in February is going to start rolling out to other phones on Thursday (March 28), with Galaxy AI capabilities at the heart of the update. Models getting the Galaxy AI features include last year's Galaxy S23 flagships — the standard S23, along with the Galaxy S23 Plus, Galaxy S23 Ultra and Galaxy S23 FE — the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5. Also, this week, the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra, Tab S9+ and Tab S9 WiFi should start getting the One UI 6.1 update.
Galaxy AI was the major focus of this year's Galaxy S24 launch, with those phones benefitting from AI-powered capabilities aimed at improving communication, simplifying searches and expanding editing capabilities. To that end, Galaxy flagships released last year will be able to benefit from features like:
- Circle to Search, in which you can circle or tap on part of an image to trigger a search, with the results appearing in a window that slides up over the app you're currently in;
- Live Translate, in which you can get real-time translations of phone calls, including captions of your conversation;
- Chat Assist, which also translates text messages and provides suggested tweaks to outgoing messages based on what tone you want to affect; and
- Generative Edit, a photo-editing tool that lets you resize and move subjects in a photograph.
Other Galaxy AI features available in the One UI 6.1 update include Notes tools that auto-format and summarize your notes, improvements to the Voice Recorder app that bring transcripts and summary features, and AI-suggested photo edits to remove things like reflections from your images.
Samsung has promised these features will be provided for free through the end of 2025 on devices that support Galaxy AI — a number that's growing once One UI 6.1 starts showing up on this new round of devices.
In announcing plans last month to bring Galaxy AI to more phones, Samsung said its goal was to make AI more accessible "We plan to bring the experience to over 100 million Galaxy users within 2024 and continue to innovate ways to harness the unlimited possibilities of mobile AI," TM Roh, Samsung's president and head of mobile, said at the time.
Apart from the Galaxy S24 release, Samsung's next big phone rollout will likely feature new versions of its foldable devices. Though neither phone has been announced yet, you would imagine the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6 are in line to get Galaxy AI features, too when they appear in the second half of the year.
