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- Apple is ready to put AI in its iPhones, iPads, Macs, and smartwatches.
- Samsung has decided to put AI in a ring.
- The company just revealed the Galaxy Ring, a wearable designed to track health biomarkers with AI.
Apple wants to put artificial intelligence in your pocket or on your desk — but Samsung wants to put it on your finger.
On Wednesday, the South Korean company officially unveiled the Galaxy Ring, a piece of smart jewelry it first teased in January.
While the titanium ring's black, silver, and gold models look deceptively simple, they represent Samsung's latest hardware to boast Galaxy AI, its bold alternative to the AI-led Apple Intelligence platform announced in June.
According to Samsung, the Galaxy Ring has been built with health and wellness in mind. Its design features pick up various biomarkers, which its AI can use to give wearers a more "comprehensive understanding" of themselves, the company says.
A new feature called an "energy score," for example, intends to give users a view of their overall well-being based on an assessment of seven health metrics, such as sleeping, heart rate, and activity, carried out by on-device AI.
Other AI features include "wellness tips," which aim to deliver AI-powered advice to users about steps they can take to improve their health based on their energy scores. There's also a dedicated AI algorithm designed to review and improve sleep quality.
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According to James Kitto, the head of Samsung's UK mobile division, the ring is a key part of the company's ambitions to offer users a more personalized and "unified experience."
The more data Galaxy AI can get about a user, the more information it will have to enhance the services it provides.
In Samsung's ideal scenario, that would mean a user with a smartphone, smartwatch, and smart ring should have a better experience with Galaxy AI than someone with just one device.
"The Galaxy Ring just adds further to that," Kitto said. "This becomes an integrated passive health-data collector that allows you to track your sleep overnight, track long-term health-data trends."
Samsung is not the first to the smart-ring party, though. Finland's Oura has been selling versions of its smart ring since 2015, for example.
Samsung says users can wear the ring 24/7, whether they're sleeping, taking a shower, or swimming. It'll just need a recharge every once in a while, as the company says its battery lasts up to seven days.