A diverse country with more than 203 million people embodying a wide range of cultures and traditions, Brazil uses Brazilian Portuguese as its official language. Meanwhile, 22 neighboring countries use Latin American Spanish.

Although Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish are widely spoken, intricate variations in both languages presented various challenges when teaching Galaxy AI to discern and distinguish regional differences. That’s why Samsung R&D Institute Brazil (SRBR) collaborated with Samsung experts from Mexico — as well as third-party partners such as the science and technology institutes SiDi and Sidia — to assemble a multidisciplinary and highly skilled team that could tackle the task.

Lower Barriers, Higher Understanding

The team used thousands of sources and a combination of machine learning and language processing tools to improve the AI model’s recognition of speech, written texts, and regional variations. But local jargon and names of famous figures — including sports teams, celebrities, and bands — vary widely between regions. Also, the same meaning can be expressed in many different words. While language models need localized data to gain a comprehensive understanding of the different languages to be translated, such variations inevitably present obstacles.

For example, swimming pool is “alberca” in Mexico — but it is “pileta” in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Meanwhile, in Colombia, Bolivia and Venezuela, swimming pool is “piscina”, which is also used in Brazil but with a slight tonal difference. And while Colombians might say “chévere” to refer to something cool, Mexicans instead say “padre.”

These differences represent huge challenges for AI language understanding and learning, but the team overcame them by building larger language models, refining processing tools – and collaborating across borders and time zones.

“We had to consider local slang and different ways of speaking before adapting and testing the model accordingly, which required close collaboration between the SRBR quality assurance (QA) team and development teams,” says Mateus Pedroso, Senior Manager and Head of Software Quality Lab at SRBR. “Since SRBR is located three hours ahead of the QA team in Mexico and 12 hours behind the management team in Korea, we had to create new communication channels and processes to align results and share progress. This multicultural collaboration generated a fiesta of ideas and solutions for Galaxy AI.”

Communicating Success

Samsung’s philosophy of open collaboration came to life during this regional project as it was an iterative process that leveraged evolving technology on a global scale. To overcome linguistic and cultural barriers, the SRBR team needed to collect and manage massive amounts of data — continually refining and improving upon audio and text sources.

The teams carved out key areas of responsibility to ensure everyone could benefit from the collective skill sets across the company’s Latin American offices. The SRBR development team served as the intermediate stakeholder of the project, receiving directions from Samsung’s headquarters and developing new updates to improve the AI model while carrying out tests for numerous use cases.

“The testing phase required extensive communication and collaboration with QA teams to optimize the user experience, and each adjustment needed further testing and review,” says Leandro Flores de Moura, Software Development Manager at SiDi. “The success of Galaxy AI’s language capabilities is built on communication and collaboration as much as it is on technical expertise” adds Nathan Castro, QA Test Developer at SiDi.

A Roadmap for Culture

What makes Galaxy AI particularly interesting for everyone involved is the fact that this wasn’t merely a language project. To them, language is a cultural guide that provides valuable insight into people’s heritage and identity.

“For SiDi’s QA team, this was an endeavor that will change the world by enabling cultures to come together and overcome the difficulty of communicating in different languages,” adds Estefanía Castro Suárez, Test Developer at SiDi. “Knowing we were part of this fills us with pride and motivation.”

“The way the SRBR team collaborated exemplifies what Galaxy AI sets out to achieve—making the world a smaller place through communicating, sharing and interacting with people, even those who speak different languages,” concludes Pedroso. “This capability will only grow as more languages come on board with Galaxy AI.”

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As Samsung continues to pioneer premium mobile AI experiences, we visit Samsung Research centers around the world to learn how Galaxy AI is enabling more users to maximize their potential. Galaxy AI now supports 16 languages, so more people can expand their language capabilities, even when offline, thanks to on-device translation in features such as Live Translate, Interpreter, Note Assist and Browsing Assist. But what does AI language development involve? Last time we visited Vietnam to learn about preparing the data that is used to train AI models. This time, we’re seeing how teams made Galaxy AI a unique offering for both the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong.

The rapid growth in AI tools that use large language models (LLM) has been seen worldwide, and China is no exception. With Baidu’s ERNIE Bot and Meitu’s MiracleVision emerging as popular choices in China, Samsung R&D Institute China partnered with both companies to help build Galaxy AI features for the country.

Samsung R&D Institute China in Guangzhou (SRC-G) and Beijing (SRC-B) worked to ensure Mandarin speakers in China had the same Galaxy AI experience as other users around the world, despite the back-end technology looking very different. The team took advantage of the dedicated resources of Chinese dialects from third-party partners and built a unique Galaxy AI solution for China.

“We have the advantage of blending global best practices with China’s local practices, as well as creating new features and constantly improving them through daily communication with Chinese consumers,” says Hairong Zhang, Software Innovation Group Leader at SRC-G. “With rich development experience from the Galaxy S24, I’m proud of how our team cooperated with local Chinese AI companies such as Baidu and Meitu to provide a solution that resonates in China.”

At the beginning, the teams had to acclimate to each other’s working styles and iron out the initial kinks of information asymmetry. Daijun Zhang, Head of SRC-B, established a task force to ensure the project followed the development schedule and moved quickly toward its goals.

Thanks to the Beijing team’s experience in generating large-scale models and successful collaboration with third-party partners, all the generative AI features were successfully launched in China. The result is a solution that has local relevance and market-specific features such as Touch to Search.

Expanding on Chinese To Develop for the Cantonese Dialect

Chinese for mainland China (Mandarin) arrived on Galaxy AI with the launch of the Galaxy S24 in January 2024. But the job for Samsung R&D Institute China was far from finished. The team was also tasked with developing the AI model for Chinese in Hong Kong (Cantonese), a dialect that builds on the work already carried out for Mandarin but brings an entirely new set of language features to address.

In developing for Cantonese, the China R&D team faced major cultural challenges that it needed to respond to in order to fully support localization for the market. The first cultural phenomenon is the two sets of systems for writing and speech. Hong Kong locals use grammar and expressions similar to Mandarin when writing but adopt a completely different colloquial grammar when communicating daily. Also, Cantonese has nine tones for pronunciation, whereas Mandarin has four.

Another cultural phenomenon is that the Cantonese dialect itself develops with the times. Add to that the fact that people often blend Cantonese and English into conversations, and it’s clear to see why it was complicated to create test cases and validate language packs.

“Cantonese is a very unique dialect that varies in different Cantonese-speaking regions,” says Jing Li, who leads the operation for testing the Cantonese AI solution. “Some of the slang, phrases, vocabulary and even the tones are varied from place to place. Therefore, we conducted a large amount of work in verifying the Hong Kong-specific data, as well as proofreading tens of thousands of relevant test cases.”

With these complexities in mind, SRC-G and SRC-B worked together to support a deep code mix using a mixture of Cantonese and English for speech recognition, simultaneously supporting both written and spoken expressions in machine translation and reflecting current pronunciations in speech synthesis.

Cultural Impact of Communication

When Galaxy AI launched the Chinese (Hong Kong) language option, the customer feedback showed that the hard work of the Samsung R&D team was justified.

For both the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, Samsung’s Galaxy AI activities show the importance of a global brand having a local presence and expertise, as well as the power of open collaboration with other organizations. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is a key part of the cultural identity of those who live there. That’s why it was so important for the team to get the AI language model right.

“Language and communication are crucial in every region and in all walks of life,” says Henry Wat, Heads of Engineering Group at Samsung Electronics Hong Kong. “No matter the language, any tool that helps people communicate is invaluable. I believe our work is meaningful.”

In the next episode of The Learning Curve, we will head to Brazil to see how a team works across cultures and borders to bring Galaxy AI to more people.

Join Galaxy AI-Volution Squad Today!

Purchase our latest Galaxy innovation

• Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: https://www.samsung.com/my/smartphones/galaxy-s24-ultra/buy/
• Samsung Galaxy S24+ | Samsung Galaxy S24: https://www.samsung.com/my/smartphones/galaxy-s24/buy/

To learn more about Galaxy AI, visit: https://www.samsung.com/my/galaxy-ai