When Samsung Electronics unveiled its first artificial intelligence (AI) powered smartphone, the Galaxy S24, earlier this month, the company emphasized AI features that automatically translate real-time calls into 13 languages. Tech reporters at the Chosunilbo checked out how well this feature works.
Real-time calls were made in Japanese, Chinese and English. A Mainichi correspondent in Korea and reporters fluent in Chinese and English were involved in the evaluation. Feedback from the foreign-language speakers revealed that Galaxy S24 managed to translate short sentences fairly well but struggled with longer sentences and sometimes failed to recognize Korean during a call involving another language.
Bottom line: While conducting a professional interview using the device’s real-time call translation feature is challenging, the feature enables users to understand roughly 70% of calls made in a foreign language - making short, casual conversations possible.
The text translation feature of the Galaxy S24 translates texts into various styles, including ‘#social’, ‘polite’, and ‘relaxed’, depending on the recipient of the text. For instance, the Korean phrase equivalent of an ‘urgent request (갑작스러운 요청)’ is translated into ‘urgent request’ via ‘professional’ text translation version but is converted to ‘short notice’ under the ‘relaxed’ version.
When translating Millennial and Gen Z slang terms like JMT - used when something tastes really, really good - Galaxy S24 performed better on some words compared with OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT and Naver’s translation cloud service Papago but could not translate others.
Bottom line: Galaxy S24′s text translation feature is useful as it presents a wide range of expressions in different contexts, but it struggled with translating the latest slang.
