Samsung’s Galaxy S24 to integrate Baidu AI chatbot in China

[Photo by Yonhap, Courtesy of Samsung]

Samsung Electronics Co. is partnering with Chinese information technology (IT) company Baidu Inc. to target the Chinese market with the Galaxy S24 series, its artificial intelligence (AI) smartphone. The move is seen as part of the company’s effort to boost its AI technology competitiveness and expand its market share as Chinese manufacturers have been introducing their own smartphones with AI features.

According to IT industry sources on Sunday, Samsung Electronics reportedly formed a strategic partnership with Baidu Smart Cloud at the Galaxy S24 series new product unveiling event held in China last week.

Baidu, along with Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, is one of China’s giant IT companies that developed the country’s first generative AI, Ernie Bot.

In October 2023, Baidu unveiled the latest version, Ernie Bot 4.0, a Chinese version of ChatGPT with more than 100 million users as of December 2023.

Samsung Electronics plans to integrate Ernie Bot into the Galaxy AI of the Galaxy S24 series in China, which will be used for the real-time call interpretation, text translation, and note summarization functions provided by the Galaxy S24. The phone will also include the Circle to Search feature, allowing users to draw a circle to search.

Baidu Smart Cloud explained via its official WeChat account that the Galaxy AI released by Samsung Electronics integrates various functions of Baidu Ernie Bot to provide call interpretation, translation, and other generative AI experiences.

Galaxy AI is based on Samsung Electronics’ in-house large language model (LLM) Gauss and Google LLC’s Gemini, and the South Korean company will collaborate closely with Google to introduce AI features such as Circle to Search in the Galaxy S24. The collaboration with Baidu is seen as an effort to provide AI features in China where Google services are not available.

China is a challenging market for Galaxy but Samsung Electronics has been consistently introducing new products to target the Chinese market. Samsung Electronics’ market share is estimated to be about 1 percent, according to industry sources.

According to market research firm IDC, Apple Inc. accounted for 17.3 percent of China’s smartphone market in 2023, followed by Honor (17.1 percent), Oppo (16.7 percent), Vivo (16.5 percent), and Xiaomi (13.2 percent). Excluding Apple, all other companies are local Chinese manufacturers.

China is considered a crucial market as competition enhances in the AI smartphone segment, with Chinese manufacturers showcasing AI-equipped new products featuring AI before the Galaxy S24 Unpacked event in January 2024.

Honor, which ranked second in the Chinese market share in 2023, unveiled the Magic 6 Series in January 2024 that features an AI model with 7 billion parameters developed by Honor providing functions such as article summarization, photo search using text, and AI-based video creation.

Honor also applied the jointly developed operating system Honor Magic OS 8.0 with Baidu, which understands user intentions and suggests related apps.

Oppo unveiled the flagship smartphone Find X7 series on January 12th, 2024, applying its in-house LLM Andes GPT with 7 billion parameters for the first time. The Find X7 series summarizes call content using AI and introduces photo editing features, such as removing subjects from images.

Vivo also introduced the AI-equipped Vivo S18 Pro in December 2023 that incorporates its in-house developed AI, BlueLM, to provide document summarization and image search functions.

The AI-equipped smartphones from Honor, Oppo, and Vivo are all estimated to be priced below 1 million won ($747).

Samsung Electronics is striving to strengthen its position in the Chinese market for AI smartphones by leveraging its technological competitiveness, featuring the flagship Galaxy S24. AI smartphones are currently expected to grow rapidly with an average annual growth rate of 83 percent until 2027.

According to market research firm Counterpoint Research, Samsung Electronics is expected to account for a 50 percent market share in the next two years, followed by other major Chinese manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Vivo, Honor, and Oppo.

Samsung Electronics, in the meantime, has extended the pre-order deadline from January 31st to February 8th, 2024, in Korea due to its high popularity. The company stated the pre-order for the latest device on January 26th.