Samsung’s $1,300 phone might someday have fees for AI usage

Samsung’s big Galaxy S24 launch was yesterday, and to hear Samsung tell the story, the big highlight of the event was “Galaxy AI.” Another view is that Galaxy AI is the usual bundle of baked-in Samsung features skinned on top of Android, but with generative AI being the hot new thing, Samsung went with AI-centric branding. Whatever value you want to place on Samsung’s AI features, you might soon have to place an actual monetary value on them: Despite devices like the Galaxy S24 Ultra costing $1,300, Samsung might start charging for some of these AI phone features.

The fine print on Samsung’s Galaxy S24 promotional page features 44 asterisks and footnotes, and tucked away in that pile of caveats is the line “Galaxy AI features will be provided for free until the end of 2025 on supported Samsung Galaxy devices.” That means Samsung reserves the right to charge for Galaxy AI after 2025.

AI features that require server time have an ongoing cost. Google and Amazon figured this out in the last AI generation (if we can call it that) with the Google Assistant and Alexa voice assistants. Amazon’s finances on the whole situation are clearer than Google’s, and Amazon’s 2022 Alexa financials were reportedly a $10 billion loss. Amazon is planning on a subscription model for Alexa in the future. Google’s normal user subscription plan is Google One, and while that mainly gets you more account storage, it also unlocks some Google AI features like “Magic eraser” in Google Photos. ChatGPT has a subscription plan for its best model, ChatGPT 4, too. Samsung apparently wants to join the party.

This is the company that makes Bixby and the notoriously poorly coded Tizen, though, so it’s hard to imagine Galaxy AI features being worth paying for. The first item on Samsung’s “Galaxy AI” promo page is Google’s “Circle to search,” a feature it can’t charge for and didn’t build. The Galaxy AI features made by Samsung include “Interpreter,” which is a copy of Google Translate’s conversation mode, and Voice Recorder, a voice transcription app that is just a copy of Google Recorder (and apparently not as good). “Chat Assist” is part of the keyboard and can rewrite any inputted text with generative AI, making your input sound more “fun” or “professional.” “Note Assist” is a Samsung Notes feature that can generate AI summaries of your notes. The one interesting feature is “Live Translate,” which does voice translation of a phone call, translating communication via speech-to-text-to-speech. There’s a lot that can go wrong there, though.

Samsung is a hardware company, and presumably, a lot of these use on-device processing instead of bothering a server somewhere, so it’s hard to know if Samsung even has any serious costs to recoup. Like most Samsung Android features, this feels more like throwing a pile of stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks rather than a collection of killer apps. These are essentially all just app features, too, meaning they have to compete with the nearly infinite Play Store app selection, and you could easily download a free competitor.

The first step to charging for something like this is throwing the idea out there, so Samsung is probably listening to how people will react between now and the end of 2025.