Baidu’s Ernie AI chatbot to power Samsung’s new Galaxy S24 smartphones

Baidu AI Cloud will be integrating its Ernie chatbot into Samsung’s Galaxy S24 smartphones, allowing users to translate calls in real time, among other features.

Ernie is the Chinese tech giant’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence technology that’s able to generate humanlike responses to users’ prompts.

It comes a week after Samsung revealed its latest Galaxy S24 lineup with AI-powered features as the South Korean electronics giant attempts to overtake the likes of Apple‘s newest iPhones with the technology.

“Now featuring Ernie’s understanding and generation capabilities, the upgraded Samsung Note Assistant can translate content and also summarize lengthy content into clear, intelligently organized formats at the click of a button, streamlining the organization of extensive text,” the firms said in a statement.

Samsung was not among the top 5 smartphone vendors in China.

Apple was the largest smartphone vendor in China by shipments in 2023, and captured 17.3% of market share in the country, IDC data on Thursday showed. Honor came in second place with 16.8% market share, followed by Vivo, Huawei and Oppo.

The Ernie 4.0 version was launched on October. Baidu claims it is the “most powerful version of Ernie foundation model to date,” with the full capabilities of understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory.

Baidu has also claimed Ernie 4.0′s capabilities are as advanced as those of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

“It has been significantly improved compared to the online version of Ernie bot and now it is not inferior to GPT-4,” said CEO Robin Li during the Baidu World 2023 event in October.

Baidu said at the end of December that Ernie bot had surpassed 100 million users just four months after the company released its chatbot to the public, as it competes with the likes of Tencent‘s Hunyuan and Alibaba‘s Tongyi Qianwen in generative AI in China.

ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after its launch in November 2022.

Baidu’s stock has had a rough start to the year after media reports said a People’s Liberation Army-affiliated organization that oversees cyberwarfare had tested its AI system on Ernie. Baidu denied the report, saying it has “not engaged in any business collaboration” with the institution.

Baidu shares are down 7.53% year-to-date.

Market intelligence firm IDC has said that going into 2024, more AI functions will be integrated into personal devices including smartphones, driven by the advancement of semiconductor technology.