There’s a graveyard full of failed dedicated AI assistant devices from last year. Samsung is here to trample on those burial mounds and declare the real age of the AI assistant has arrived. The Samsung Galaxy S25 phones could be the first real shot at mobile cross-app capabilities. These devices ask you to trust they’ll take a text and turn it into a calendar event, nearly hands-free. That is, as long as you believe the AI model won’t make a mistake.
These AI features debuted at Samsung’s latest Galaxy Unpacked are nearly everything Apple promised with Apple Intelligence last year, now made flesh. But among these promises is the underlying problem of AI reliability. Samsung demoed the feature for Gizmodo behind closed doors, but we have yet to put it through its paces. Samsung promises its on-device and cloud-based AI processing is keeping all your data secure,
The Galaxy S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra phones are now using Google Gemini rather than any proprietary blend of AI like Samsung’s previous devices. However, just because Google’s software is prominent doesn’t mean you can ignore all your Samsung apps. If you ask the AI assistant to make a calendar event for you based on a screencap, the device will default to your Samsung Calendar, not Google. If you want it to use Google Calendar, you’ll need to specify it in your prompt.
Older features like call translation that were prominent in last year’s Galaxy S24 remain on-device, though that’s not the case with every new AI feature. The generative edit Magic Eraser-like feature now works on-device, which Samsung said is due to the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. AI-enhanced Gallery and settings search are both on-device, but your Gemini-based assistant won’t keep to your phone all the time, based on some prompts. It’s the reason why Google is packing six months of Gemini Advanced subscriptions (along with 2 TB of cloud storage) with every new S25.
Samsung showed how you can select what apps and content you will let the AI access. This isn’t just for the prompts you give to the AI assistant. The new Now Brief widget that appears on the lock screen is also suffused with AI. By default, it has access to everything from your health and wellness tracking to your photos and calendar events.
Samsung calls the on-device AI privacy the “personal data engine.” Samsung said all of the users’ data is end-to-end encrypted when it’s sent to the company for cloud processing. The company also promises it doesn’t use prompts or data for targeted advertising. Still, you can also change a setting only to process data on-device. Doing so may cut out access to several AI features that require cloud data.
All these new software features could find a use, though we still need to try it all outside of Samsung’s locked-down preview vacuum. What’s more, you need to remember that not all the new AI features work directly on-device. The most complicated tasks require a more sophisticated AI model, and that means relying on Google’s taxed data centers that guzzle down hoards of water and electricity. AI will continue to make our ongoing climate crisis worse, even while big tech continues to promote nuclear power.
If you’re asking the AI to write a text, the bot won’t hit send for you. If you ask it to change your settings, it will bring you to the correct page, but you’ll need to hit the button yourself. As long as users have control, they can fix any mistakes the AI model is prone to making. The bigger problem will be whether the AI will still accomplish the task, even when you’re not looking.
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