Samsung is continuing its One UI 8.5 rollout to millions of Galaxy phones, bringing with it Galaxy S26 launch-exclusive AI-powered features to Galaxy S25 and Galaxy S24 phones. There was, however, a question mark about whether the Galaxy S23 series would receive the same treatment.
That appears to have been answered in a leaked changelog for the One UI 8.5 stable release, which shows Galaxy S23 users will get a flavor of the new AI tools, but not all of them.
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One UI 8.5 Brings Updated AI Tools To Samsung Galaxy S23 Series
BARCELONA, SPAIN – MARCH 2: The Galaxy S23 Ultra, the top-range smartphone from the new S23 series of smartphones by Samsung, is being exhibited during the Mobile World Congress 2023 on March 2, 2023, in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Samsung tipster Tarun Vats posted screenshots of the leaked One UI 8.5 stable changelog on X today, showing what users of the 2023 flagship can expect. The good news is that Galaxy S23 owners will get some new Galaxy S26 AI tools in this update. The bad news is that it won’t be all of them.
The biggest upgrade is to Bixby, which can now understand natural language to find features or change settings on the phone when asked.
For example, instead of digging through menus, you can tell Bixby to turn on settings such as Quick Share. You can also ask more complex questions, like how to conserve battery life without losing too much functionality, which will trigger a list of tips.
If you don’t know the name of a setting, you can say “my eyes are strained,” and it will automatically enable Eye Comfort Shield. If you mention the screen is too bright in the dark, it will trigger the Extra Dim setting.
Modern smartphones suffer from feature bloat as each new device comes with a deluge of skills that few people know about. The new Bixby, now powered by Perplexity AI, is Samsung’s answer to that. It’s a tool I use often on the Galaxy S26 Ultra because it provides a genuinely useful shortcut to features that rarely see the light of day.
I suspect Galaxy S23 owners will be most impressed by what Bixby can now do, considering how limited it was before. The other AI update in One UI 8.5 on the Galaxy S23 is to Photo Assist, which now allows continuous image generation without having to save each iteration.
What Samsung Galaxy S23 Users Are Missing Out On in This One UI 8.5 Update
There are some notable exceptions from this update for Galaxy S23 users—specifically the enhanced Audio Eraser, Creative Studio, and Call Screening. Support for Apple’s AirDrop via Quick Share also isn’t mentioned in the changelog, although a new feature will restrict file sharing to only those logged into the user’s Samsung or Google account.
That’s not to say that some of these AI tools won’t make it to the Galaxy S23 series at some point in the future. For now, Samsung is only bringing the full suite of features to Galaxy phones released after 2024, the year it officially launched Galaxy AI.
That may simply be a sensible cutoff for backporting advanced One UI 8.5 features to older phones. It could also be that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (which powered the Samsung Galaxy S24 series) was built specifically for generative AI, offering the NPU efficiency and architecture required to run large language models on-device without compromising performance. If it is a hardware and performance issue, then don’t expect to see many of the new AI skills on the Galaxy S23 series and below.
Update 04/28: Samsung Adds AI Features To Galaxy S24 FE One UI 8.5 Update
Update: 11:37 AM ET: There is finally some clarity for Galaxy S24 FE owners: the full suite of new AI features is officially making its way to the 2024 budget flagship. Photo Assist, Audio Eraser, Creative Studio, and Call Screening have been spotted in the latest One UI 8.5 beta update, as noted by tipster Tarun Vats on X.
This latest build also addresses several bugs. Most notably, it fixes a black screen issue when receiving calls and resolves a problem where green lines appeared during 4K video recording. Bluetooth stability and general system reliability have also been improved.
Unfortunately, the Galaxy S23 FE isn’t receiving the same treatment (yet). While its latest update does include the new Privacy Alerts feature, which provides transparency on how apps access your data, there is still no mention of the advanced AI toolkit arriving for the 2023 model. S23 FE users will still benefit from the same stability fixes, including the incoming call screen fix and the 4K recording patch.
The divide likely comes down to hardware. While the Galaxy S24 FE’s Exynos 2400e chipset appears powerful enough to handle the intensive NPU demands of generative AI, the older architecture in the S23 FE may might fall just short. Either that or Samsung has created an artificial cut off for phones released before Galaxy AI officially released in 2024.