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Samsung is stepping up its efforts to wrest a bigger share of the U.S. smartphone market from Apple because the South Korean tech giant launched its latest artificial intelligence-powered smartphone on Wednesday.
The company unveiled the S25 at Samsung's annual “Unpacked” event in San Jose, California, marking its latest push to leverage its first-mover lead over Apple, which has been slower to introduce generative AI features on iPhones.
TM Roh, president of Samsung's mobile division, said the S25's latest AI operating system, based on Google's Gemini major voice models and chips from Qualcomm, would give it a bonus within the US smartphone market, where the iPhone maker has the Sales dominate.
“The AI ​​ecosystem we’re developing with Google may be very well positioned within the US market,” Roh said.
Both Samsung and Apple are counting on AI technology to spice up demand for his or her smartphones after a yr of relatively stagnant global sales.
Samsung launched its first AI smartphone, the S24, in January last yr. Apple introduced initial AI capabilities – often known as Apple Intelligence – in October, followed by an integration of Siri with OpenAI's ChatGPT in December.
According to Counterpoint Research, Apple holds the most important share of the U.S. smartphone market, with about 53 percent of shipments within the quarter ending September, in comparison with Samsung's 23 percent.
The launch comes at a critical time for Samsung, which has been hit by a series of failures in its semiconductor division. Its shares have plunged greater than 30 percent previously six months, prompting the group to make a rare apology in October for its poor performance.
Samsung's decision to make use of Qualcomm application processors as an alternative of its own Exynos series for the S25 marks the newest setback for its chip division, which accounts for 60 percent of operating profit.
The company can be coming under pressure from Chinese competitors within the rapidly growing foldable phone segment.
Roh said the S25 would help users transition from the era of touchscreens, where people use a variety of apps day by day, to an era dominated by an AI voice assistant that may perform actions on the device on the user's behalf .
Samsung says the S25 operating system offers faster responses to voice and text instructions which might be tailored to the user based on data stored locally on the device.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite chips are getting used for the primary time in all three models of the S25 and, in keeping with Samsung, bring a 40 percent increase in performance for the neural processor, the “brain” that powers the AI.
WhatsApp and Spotify are among the many first third-party apps that may interact with the revamped AI assistant. Roh said the goal is to construct a big ecosystem of Android apps that Gemini can interact with.
He added that the S25 would offer Google Gemini in 46 different languages. Apple, which uses a mix of its own LLMs and OpenAI's ChatGPT, has to this point only rolled out Apple Intelligence in local varieties of English, with more planned by April.
But the extent to which generative AI will shake up the smartphone industry stays unclear, in keeping with analysts.
Technology analytics firm Canalys said Monday that buyers have gotten increasingly aware of the brand new features, which is sweet news for Samsung “given its global availability and first-mover advantage.”
However, a survey of consumers with AI-enabled smartphones conducted in December by price comparison site SellCell found that a big majority of each Apple and Samsung users felt the initial features added “little or no value.”
