Samsung unveiled its latest products at its Unpacked event in Paris and as expected, the new Galaxy AI was the focus of almost all of its offerings.
New Galaxy AI features include Sketch to Image, which lets you turn your quick doodles into more beautiful designs, Interpreter, which lets you translate between languages in real time – either for phone conversations or for the people you meet, and Composer for AI-generated emails.
Some or all of these tools will be available on Samsung’s various new devices, which we’ve already had the chance to try out. You can find our initial verdicts in our Galaxy Z Fold 6 hands-on review, Galaxy Z Flip 6 hands-on review, Galaxy Ring hands-on review and Galaxy Watch Ultra hands-on review. Some features will also be available on older Galaxy devices, and we have a full Galaxy AI compatibility guide that explains it all.
However, Samsung isn’t the only company betting big on AI right now, and many of the new and existing Galaxy AI features are very similar to Apple’s intelligence. This was announced at Apple’s WWDC 2024 in June and will be available when iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 Sequoia launch later this year, likely in September.
With Samsung’s latest devices launching on July 24, the Korean company is set to beat Apple with its new AI offerings – but is first the best? Here’s how we think the tech giants are positioning themselves as the AI war enters a new phase.
Picture stick vs. sketch for the picture
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Both Apple Intelligence and Galaxy AI have a fun AI feature that turns your sketches into drawings, which is what you’ll want to try first on both systems.
Apple calls its feature Image Wand, while Samsung calls it Sketch to Image. We haven’t been able to test Image Wand in practice yet, but from the demos we’ve seen, it certainly looks impressive. It even takes into account any text on the same page as your sketch when trying to figure out what you’re drawing and before it generates an AI image. So if you’ve opened a page in Notes and tried to draw a horse next to some text about a horse, this will help Apple figure out what your sketch is supposed to represent.
The TechRadar team got to play around with Sketch to Image at the Samsung event and we have to say, we’re impressed. You have a choice of five styles to see your drawing in: watercolor, illustration, sketch, pop art, 3D cartoon. Draw something obvious, like a house, and it’ll do just fine, but sometimes it gets it wrong when guessing what your more obscure doodles are. A Lego brick we tried to draw, for example, turned into a hotplate before our eyes.
Provisional winner: Samsung
Siri vs Google Gemini
Apple used AI to improve Siri in iOS 18. It now includes more natural language processing features, so you can mess up your words and make mistakes and still be understood. It also remembers what you just asked so you can continue a conversation, and it pulls in data from Photos, Calendar, Messages, and other apps to learn more about you, so you can ask things like, “When’s my next appointment with Joe?”
In contrast, Samsung has gone all-in on Google Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, for its latest phones. Gemini can do pretty much anything it can on the web, but on your phone. It also integrates with Google apps like Gmail and Calendar, so it can learn more about you in a way that’s similar to Siri.
Gemini can create text, generate images, identify photos, and also promises to do most processing on the device and access the cloud only when needed, which increases security. Gemini can also multitask, so you can watch a video on your phone and ask questions about it in a Gemini side window. The only minor catch is that Samsung has said this feature will be “coming soon,” but hasn’t given a firm date yet.
Since Apple has secure access to a ton of data about its users, we suspect Siri will be a little better at the digital assistant elements than Gemini, but to be sure we’d have to test the two right side by side. For example, you can ask Siri when your mom’s plane is landing, and Siri will know who your mom is and calculate the landing time based on your messages and emails. But while Siri needs to turn on ChatGPT when the requests get too complicated, Gemini is already a fully functional chatbot execution, so it’s difficult to compare. What we do know is that AI will be deeply integrated into your next phone, whether you say “Hey Siri” or “Hey Google.”
Provisional winner: Apple
Health apps
Curiously, in the iOS 18 preview at WWDC, Apple didn’t mention at all that it would use Apple Intelligence to improve the features of its iOS Health app. In contrast, Samsung promises that its Health app will use Galaxy AI to analyze the vast amounts of data on your sleep patterns, heart rate, activity level, stress, and breathing rate to determine an overall energy score out of 100. This energy score, combined with tips for improvement throughout the day, gives you the information to know whether you should take it easy or push yourself harder when exercising.
Provisional winner: Samsung
The ability to generate text that could have been written by a human first caught global attention and revealed the power of AI chatbots. Both Galaxy AI and Apple Intelligence are bringing this feature to your next phone – but in different ways.
Apple’s built-in writing tools work more like an assistant for text you’ve already written. When you’re writing an email, you can have it rewrite it in a different style, or you can have iOS 18 highlight the key points of your email and proofread it. Galaxy AI uses Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, which can do these things too, but isn’t as well integrated with Gmail or the Mail app. But it does have features like Composer, which is built into the Mail app and generates emails based on prompts. So you can type, “Write Jenny an email about why I can’t come to her party,” and the text will be generated.
Since iOS 18 has built-in access to ChatGPT, the feature should also be able to generate text. However, we have yet to see how this will be implemented in comparison.
Provisional winner: Apple
Pictures and photos
One of the big selling points of Apple Intelligence is the ability to generate your own emojis from prompts, like “a fish in a tuxedo” or “a smiley face with cucumbers for eyes.” These Genmojis can also access your photo library, so you can create them based on pictures of your real friends and family, which is very clever.
While both Samsung and Apple have a number of AI features that can help you clean up your photos, edit them, and remove unwanted objects, there’s nothing quite like Genmoji in Samsung’s Galaxy AI offering. While Samsung has shown that its new Galaxy phones can create a 3D image of a person from a photo, we’re still giving this win to Apple because you can get a huge variety of results with Genmoji.
Apple also offers Image Playground, an AI image generator that also recognizes who the people in your photo library are. Once you’ve created them, you can use them in your prompts, making it easy to create fun images like “James wins a marathon” or “Dad climbs Everest.”
Provisional winner: Apple
translation
Look further
A key feature of the new Samsung phones is the interpreter, which allows them to translate between languages on the fly. So you can speak in English and have it translated into Thai, for example, so that the person sitting across from you can understand. The phone will also read the text out loud. It also works during phone conversations and is particularly well suited to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, where you have one screen that can be viewed by two people at the same time. That means you can use it in person to do quick text translations in the palm of your hand.
Apple now has the Translate app in iOS, which can process voice input, but the output is limited to text. Samsung is way ahead here.
Provisional winner: Samsung
Seek
Circle to Search is a great image-based search feature that’s already available on select Android phones and will be included in both new Samsung Galaxy models. You simply draw a circle around an image and Galaxy AI identifies what it is and then searches for it.
While Apple has improved the natural language search feature on the iPhone in the Photos app, it can’t do anything about web searches – because it doesn’t have a partnership with Google. This is where Samsung has the edge.
Provisional winner: Samsung
And the first winner is…
Samsung! Galaxy AI and Apple Intelligence hold up really well in comparison. They have broadly similar feature sets, it just depends on your preferences in implementation and whether you’re swayed by fun things like Genmoji.
It seems like Apple Intelligence will be more deeply integrated into the operating system than Samsung’s Galaxy AI, but Samsung still has some neat tricks up its sleeve with Interpreter, Circle to Search, and the AI innovations in its Health app.
All in all, I give the edge to Samsung for getting their product to market first, but this is going to be a long battle and it’s not over yet. Let’s see where we stand when the iPhone 16 comes out. In the meantime, you can sign up for the iOS 18 beta to try out Apple AI there when it’s expected to be released in late July.
