What are the cool new AI features?

This article was written for Western Sydney Publishing and published in March 2026. Last week, I shared my first impressions of the new Galaxy S26 Ultra. Now that I’ve spent more time with it, I’ve been able to explore its AI features in more detail.

One of the standout features is Photo Assist, which is part of the Gallery App. You can describe the edits you want in simple language, and the phone makes the changes for you. For example, you can ask it to remove someone next to you, change your shirt to red, or turn yourself into a cartoon. The phone figures out how to do it, and all the processing happens right on the device, so you don’t need to upload your photos anywhere. There’s also a ProScaler tool that sharpens images and text from lower-quality pictures.

Samsung also added Creative Studio. Unlike Photo Assist, which edits your photos, Creative Studio lets you make images, sketches, and other visuals from scratch. It’s great for anyone who wants to personalise their content or quickly make graphics without using another app. You can turn your drawings, cutouts, or small graphics into stickers for messages, social media, or notes.

The S26 comes with a document scanner that works with photos of paperwork. It finds the edges of the document in your photo and crops it neatly, even if the picture was taken at an angle. It also makes the text clearer and fixes the lighting. Since I often take photos of documents while on-site, I find this feature very useful.

Travellers and people who work internationally will like the live phone call translation feature. The phone supports more than 25 languages. You just pick the language the other person is speaking, and the phone translates the call in real time. It can also act as an interpreter, translating spoken conversations and giving you both voice and text output. This should make travelling a lot easier.

The phone can also convert voice and call recordings into text and provide a summary for quick review. It does this for notes and other documents too, and it can summarise and translate web pages, then read the summaries out loud.

AI has also improved how the phone handles email. It can spot important content and suggest actions with a feature called Now Nudge. There’s also Now Brief, which creates a daily digest of key emails, calendar items, and upcoming events. Writing Assist helps you adjust the tone, wording, and clarity of your emails.

There are loads more AI tools built in, and it will take me a while to decide whether they are effective tools or just a bit of fun.