For the second year in a row, the story of Samsung’s new flagship Galaxy phones isn’t about hardware changes. For better or worse, the Galaxy S25 features few material changes from its predecessor, and many of the most substantive enhancements come courtesy of new AI features Samsung has built into One UI.
The highlight of those is something Samsung is calling the Personal Data Engine. Over time, One UI 7 will collect and analyze data about how you use your S25 to personalize the software experience. This customization will be most visible in two new features called Now Brief and Now Bar. The former will generate morning, midday and evening summaries of information that might be relevant to you. For instance, in a morning brief, you might see the day’s weather, a calendar of your upcoming meetings, and news stories that might interest you.
The latter, on the other hand, is a new interface element you can access from both the S25’s lock screen and just below the digital clock when the phone is unlocked. The Now Bar will automatically generate a Rolodex of reminders you can flip through throughout the day. One widget might include directions from Google Maps, while another could feature the 45-minute timer you set earlier in the day.
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It’s all basic stuff, but Samsung is betting these features — and the ones I’m about to detail — will save S25 users time by reducing the amount of jumping between apps they need to do. According to the company, any usage information the Personal Data Engine records is kept secure and private inside the S25’s Knox Vault security enclave.
AI Select as seen in use with YouTube.
The Galaxy S25 also includes a series of interconnected features that broadly fall under a concept Samsung is calling AI agents. These agents are powered by multi-modal machine learning models, meaning they can parse images, videos, audio and text. Samsung has deployed these throughout One UI 7, though you’re most likely to encounter them through the Samsung sidebar.
The most interesting of the new agents is called AI Select. It builds on the Smart Select tool previous Galaxy phones featured. When evoked, AI Select will scan the screen and suggest actions based on what it sees. As mentioned, the model powering this feature is multi-modal, so it’s not limited to reading just text. For example, say you bring up AI Select while watching a YouTube video. In that context, the tool will offer to create a GIF for you. Again, the idea here is to simplify an action that previously may have required multiple apps and steps.
At the same time, Samsung has polished existing AI tools to make them better. Most notably, Sketch to Image, now known as Drawing Assist, is more accurate and detailed and includes the option to import existing images.
Separately, the Galaxy S25 series will ship with an improved version of Circle to Search. For the uninitiated, Circle to Search is a way to access Google Search from nearly anywhere on your phone without switching between apps. You activate the feature by long-pressing your phone’s Home button. Circle to Search arrived at the start of last year, with Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 owners among the first to get access. The latest version of Circle to Search can recognize phone numbers, emails and URLs, allowing you to call, email or visit a website with a single tap. Additionally, Circle to Search now also includes integration with Google’s AI Overviews.
These enhancements aren’t limited to Samsung devices, and Google is in the process of rolling them out to all Android phones.
Watch the livestream of the Galaxy S25 launch and follow the Samsung Unpacked liveblog for ongoing real-time coverage.
