It’s been just about a year since we entered the era of Galaxy AI, and so far, nothing feels like our culture has been revolutionized. Samsung might have promised an all-new mobile landscape, but between the Galaxy S24 launch last winter and the summer arrival of the Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Fold 6, I can’t say I’ve noticed a change. However, with the Galaxy S25’s unveiling just about a week away, the company has another shot at proving Galaxy AI is here to stick, and it might all center around everyone’s favorite phrase: multimodal.




Today, Samsung published a blog post detailing how AI has, in its eyes, can help any S Pen user unleash both their creativity and productivity. I’ll spare you the full text, which is filled with buzzwords like “groundbreaking” and “indispensable,” but hidden within this pre-S25 tease is confirmation on what we’ll see on stage in San Jose next week. Sketch to Image — one of the marquee tools unveiled at Unpacked in July of last year — is going multimodal with One UI 7, allowing new and existing users alike to create and edit drawings and photos without having to pick up an S Pen at all.

A Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 with an image editor interface open.

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The Galaxy Z Fold 6 unfolded showing the home screen.


With One UI 7, Sketch to Image is getting a whole new slew of upgrades, presumably designed to help those of us who are, let’s say, drawing-impaired (guilty). Rather than needing to physically sketch over a pre-existing image, supported Galaxy devices will be able to use text or voice commands to describe a piece of art, similar to how Pixel Studio works on the Pixel 9 series. Samsung even describes using these two tools in tandem, sketching out a cat before using text commands to add a space suit to your drawing.

Again, I’m not exactly sure how much of this will really make an impact on how the majority of users treat their phones — I’d love to see how often Pixel Studio is opened nearly five months after launch — but it does show Samsung willing to attempt an evolution of its first-gen Galaxy AI features. That said, I’d prefer to see One UI 7 using AI to help teach people to draw, and to not simply allow users to skip over the entire process by typing a few words, but that might just be me. In this time of everything-AI-all-the-time, I’m clearly on the outside looking in.


Early Galaxy S25 rumors indicated we wouldn’t hear much in the way of new Galaxy AI tools this month, with a specific focus on on-device AI before adding more features with One UI 7.1 later in 2025. If a multimodal upgrade to Sketch to Image is setting the tone for what to expect on the AI side from Samsung next week, keep your expectations in check. It’s also worth remembering that Samsung, as far as we know, still plans on potentially charging for Galaxy AI once 2025 wraps up. Whether there’s enough added to One UI yet to get customers to shell out for a subscription, however, remains to be seen.

An illustration of a metallic x against a blue background with the text

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