The last couple of weeks, I’ve been using Galaxy AI more often. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, since it took me a while to embrace this set of tools.
Galaxy AI features like Interpreter and Photo Assist, while interesting and helpful, haven’t integrated well with my everyday workflow.
Plus, one reason I bought a Samsung Galaxy S25+ was to keep up with Galaxy AI and learn how to incorporate it into my personal and professional routine.
But I finally found a small set of tools that work naturally, as well as one that initially escaped my eyes when I saw it.
I use these to get through my day-to-day
I have personal favorites that I sometimes forget originate from the Galaxy AI suite.
The first one is AI Select. I lived off of Smart Select before AI Select replaced it. It’s a simple tool, and one that is a permanent stay on my Edge Panel setup.
I use it every day for personal screenshots when I want to save and send quoted messages or snippets from my favorite discussions on Reddit and Discord, and to clean up screenshots that may contain personal information.
The outlining method the built-in AI employs is consistently precise, unlike when I used to drag the selection manually in Smart Select.
Plus, there are some extra cool features you can do with it after you zone in on an area on your screen, like copying text that you couldn’t otherwise normally copy, as well as translating foreign characters that the AI detects.
Not that I really use the latter as much as the former, but the text-copying feature has been great when I do, like, send snippets to people around me.
You can also use quick actions to convert your text or images with other integrations.
The next one that felt the most natural, Now Brief, when I paired it with Now Bar.
When I need to know things like meeting times, birthdays, or even holiday reminders, Now Brief always keeps me in the loop.
Ironically, I tunnel-vision hard on a few projects and lose track of the days, and I sometimes let certain dates slip past me, which is where Now Brief comes in.
My favorite part is that it is subtle in how it does it. It doesn’t display multiple times, only a few (key) times a day, according to what your schedule is detected as (for me, it is generally in late morning and evening).
I like keeping it on my Now Bar setup since I don’t use it for much else besides media playback. That way, I can glance at my schedule without unlocking my home screen (you can do this by toggling on “Expand Now brief” without unlocking in the Now brief settings).
It’s great for starting my routine, which is vital to my workflow.
My return to Samsung Browser has proved fruitful
As a writer, I do a lot of reading. When news pops up, I need to glance over it so that I am not behind on the latest happenings (sometimes the industry can move a bit fast). When a new game-changing Android feature comes out, I need to know everything about it.
The writing portion of my workflow isn’t always what takes the most time. It’s the preliminary stages: planning, brainstorming, and research.
When I returned to using Samsung Browser to improve my tab management, I became curious about the Browser assist function that popped up on my screen.
It offers AI summarization for your web pages, so you can read the AI-produced summary as bullet points, which was fine.
I didn’t mind using that, as I liked using Gemini rewrite in Google Docs when I needed to condense lengthy paragraphs of information into something more digestible (some articles can be very technical, especially the APK breakdowns of betas that come with UI changes).
But the feature that spoke out to me was the dictation portion of Browser assist: Read highlights aloud.
You can enable or disable Browser assist sub-features by going to your settings, tapping Galaxy AI > Browsing assist, then selecting Summarize, Translate, and Read highlights aloud.
Essentially, you can use Galaxy AI to listen to web page summaries or hear highlights from the top stories on news sites.
After you select a web page in Samsung Browser, scroll to the bottom, where the Double-star icon (Galaxy AI icon) is, and tap it to open one of the three sub-options.
Selecting the Read highlight aloud option will have Galaxy AI read a summarized blurb to you, with a few playback options.
You can tune the speed from 0.5x to 3.0x, pause it, return or skip a section, or translate it to another language.
This function also works when your screen turns off, so if you want it to keep running while you’re hands-free, it will keep going, no problem.
I really liked this while doing some leisure exercise. Generally, I listen to music when I go for a walk, but I found that being productive helped on days when I felt overwhelmed by the news and needed to catch up quickly.
The only downside of using this feature is that the text being read is technically an AI-generated summary, which may sometimes gloss over the finer details of an article.
Still, getting the gist is enough while I take breaks to focus on my physical health.
I found it easy to set up, and it worked well for my learning without requiring extra screen time on my phone.
Even more Galaxy AI tricks are coming to Galaxy S25 devices
One of my not-so-favorite aspects of owning a last-gen device is seeing a disparity in features between the newest Galaxy S series and the previous one.
But that’s just part of the business model that I have grown to accept.
While I am still waiting for these features to reach my Galaxy S25+, I am pleased to see that a few Galaxy AI features are still coming to the Galaxy S25 series.
These include Prioritize and Summary notifications, as well as File Summaries, the latter of which I am looking forward to the most, since it can break down PDFs, voice recordings, and text files into brief overviews without opening the file in the Samsung My Files app.
Plus, this feature runs locally, so you don’t necessarily have to worry about sensitive content being exposed outside your device.
