Samsung announced its latest slate of products at its Unpacked event in Paris, and as expected, its new Galaxy AI was firmly at the center of almost everything it had to offer.
New Galaxy AI features include Sketch to Image, which turns your quick doodles into more aesthetic designs, Interpreter, which can translate between languages for phone calls or people you meet, in real time, 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 test; check out our hands-on review of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 , Galaxy Z Flip 6 , Galaxy Ring , and Galaxy Watch Ultra for our early verdicts. Some features will also be available on older Galaxy devices, and we’ve got a full guide to Galaxy AI compatibility to explain it all.
However, Samsung isn’t alone in tackling AI head-on right now, and many of the Galaxy’s new and existing AI features are very similar to those that make up Apple Intelligence. This feature was announced at Apple’s WWDC 2024 in June and will be available when iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 Sequoia roll out later this year, likely in September.
With Samsung’s latest devices set to launch on July 24, the Korean company will be leapfrogging Apple to market with its new AI offerings. But does first mean best? Here’s how we think the tech giants are shaping up as the AI wars enter a new phase.
Image Wand vs Sketch to Image
Picture 1 of 6
Apple Intelligence and Galaxy AI both have a fun AI feature that turns your sketches into drawings. This is what you’ll want to try first on both systems.
Apple has dubbed its feature Image Wand, while Samsung’s is called Sketch to Image. We haven’t been able to test Image Wand in real-world conditions yet, but it certainly looks impressive from the demos we’ve seen. 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 generating an AI image. So if you have a page open in Notes and you’ve tried to draw a horse next to some text about a horse, this will help Apple identify what your sketch is supposed to be.
The TechRadar team got to play around with Sketch to Image at the Samsung event, and we have to say we’re impressed. You can choose from five styles to visualize your drawing: watercolor, illustration, sketch, pop art, 3D cartoon. Draw something obvious, like a house, and it’ll work just fine, but sometimes it gets it wrong when guessing your more obscure drawings. A Lego brick we tried to draw ended up turning into a hob before our eyes, for example.
Provisional winner: Samsung
Siri vs Google Gemini
Apple used artificial intelligence to improve Siri in iOS 18. It now includes more natural language processing features, allowing you to slur your words, make mistakes, and be understood. It also remembers what you just asked it, allowing you to continue a conversation, and it pulls data from Photos, Calendar, Messages, and other apps to learn more about you, allowing you to ask things like, “When’s my next date with Joe?”
Samsung, on the other hand, has been banking on Google Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, on its latest phones. Gemini can do pretty much everything it does on the web, but on your phone. It also integrates with Google apps, like Gmail and Calendar, allowing it to learn more about you in a way similar to Siri.
Gemini can create text, generate images, identify photos, and it also promises to do most of its processing on-device, only connecting to the cloud when necessary, adding to the security. Gemini can also multitask, allowing you to watch a video on your phone and ask questions about it in a Gemini side panel. The only slight problem is that Samsung has said this feature is “coming soon,” and hasn’t provided a specific date yet.
With Apple having secure access to a lot of data about its users, we think Siri will be a bit of a better digital assistant than Gemini, but we’ll have to test them side by side to be sure. For example, you can ask Siri when your mom’s plane is landing and it will know who your mom is and calculate the landing time from your messages and emails. But while Siri has to call ChatGPT if the requests get too complicated, Gemini is already a full-fledged chatbot implementation, so it’s hard to compare them. What we do know is that whether you say “Hey Siri” or “Hey Google,” AI will be deeply integrated into your next phone.
Provisional winner: Apple
Health applications
Oddly enough, Apple made no mention of using Apple Intelligence to improve the features of its iOS Health app in its iOS 18 preview at WWDC. In contrast, Samsung promises that its Health app will use Galaxy AI to analyze the vast amounts of data it has on your sleep patterns, heart rate, activity levels, stress, and breathing rate to determine an overall energy score out of 100. This energy score, combined with tips throughout the day on how to improve it, gives you the insights you need to know whether you should take it easy or step up your exercise.
Provisional winner: Samsung
The ability to generate text that could have been written by a human is what first caught the world’s attention and revealed the power of AI chatbots, and Galaxy AI and Apple Intelligence are bringing this functionality 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. If you’re typing an email, you can rewrite it in a different style, or you can have iOS 18 highlight key points from your email and proofread it. Galaxy AI uses Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, which can also do these things, but isn’t as integrated with Gmail or the Mail app. However, it does have features like Composer built into its Mail app, which generates emails based on prompts, so you can type “Write an email to Jenny explaining why I can’t come to her party,” and it will generate the text.
Since iOS 18 has integrated access to ChatGPT, text generation should also be within reach, but we have yet to see how this will be implemented in comparison.
Provisional winner: Apple
Images and photos
One of the biggest draws of Apple Intelligence is the ability to generate your own emojis from prompts, like “a fish in a tuxedo” or “a smiley face with cucumber eyes.” These Genmojis can also access your Photos library, allowing you to create them from photos of your real friends and family, which is pretty nifty.
While both Samsung and Apple offer a slew of AI features designed to clean up your photos, edit them, and remove unwanted objects, nothing beats Genmoji in Samsung’s Galaxy AI offering. Samsung has demonstrated that the new Galaxy phones can generate a 3D image of a person from a photo, but we’re still going to give the win to Apple, due to the wide variety of results you can achieve with Genmoji.
Apple also offers Image Playground, an AI image generator that also understands who the people in your photo library are. Once created, you can use them in your prompts. So it’s easy to create fun images like “James winning a marathon” or “Dad climbing Everest.”
Provisional winner: Apple
Translation
To watch
One of the key features of Samsung’s new phones is the Interpreter feature, which allows them to translate between languages on the fly. So you can speak in English and have it translated into Thai, for example, to the person in front of you. The phone will also read the text out loud. This feature also works during phone calls and is particularly well suited to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, where you have a screen that can be seen by two people at once; this means you can use it in person to get quick text translations in the palm of your hand.
Apple, for its part, offers the Translate app on iOS, but while it can handle voice input, the output is limited to text. Samsung has a head start on this.
Provisional winner: Samsung
Research
Circle to Search is an image search feature that is already available on some Android phones and will be integrated into the two new Samsung Galaxy models. Simply draw a circle around an image and Galaxy AI will identify what it is and then search for it.
While Apple has improved natural language search on the iPhone in the Photos app, it can’t do anything about web search because it doesn’t have a partnership with Google. Samsung has the advantage here.
Provisional winner: Samsung
And the initial winner is…
Samsung! Galaxy AI and Apple Intelligence compare very well. They have broadly similar feature sets, it just depends on your implementation preference and interest in fun things like Genmoji.
Apple’s AI appears to be more deeply integrated into the operating system than Samsung’s Galaxy AI, but Samsung has a few tricks up its sleeve with Interpreter, Circle to Search, and AI innovations in its Health app.
Overall, I give Samsung the upper hand for getting their product to market first, but this is going to be a long war and it’s not over yet. Let’s see where we end up once the iPhone 16 is released. In the meantime, you can sign up for the iOS 18 beta to try out Apple’s AI when it’s released to the public, likely later in July.