How to Turn Off AI on Your Samsung Galaxy Phone, or at Least Rein It In

Last updated: 2025/01/28 at 12:22 AM

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AI, but why?How to turn off Galaxy AI services Goodbye, Bixby

At its Unpacked event last week, Samsung took the wraps off the Galaxy S25 lineup and spent a majority of the time talking about AI — a trend in phone announcements these days. Echoing both Google and Apple, Samsung said it “built an AI OS from the ground up” when referring to its latest phone software, One UI 7.

The Galaxy S25 family does bring in a wealth of new features slathered in AI, but really, who’s asking for this, besides investors? It’s true that AI is opening up new doors with how we interact with our devices, but most people just want their phones to work the way they want them to and aren’t so interested in whether something is being done by AI.

With Google and Samsung teaming up and aligning their ambitions of putting AI at the very core of their software, interacting with AI feels unavoidable, even if you don’t want to. Luckily, there are a few settings that will allow you to limit or disable AI on your phones. Below, we’ll show you how to turn off AI features on your Samsung Galaxy phone.

For more, check out our hands-on coverage of the Galaxy S25 Ultra and Galaxy S25 and 25 Plus.

AI, but why?

From talking fridges to iPhones, our experts are here to help make the world a little less complicated.

There’s something about being told what you want in a grand product presentation: it’s easy to believe that what you’re seeing is something you’ll use and want. But a CNET survey has revealed that AI on our phones appeals to far fewer people than these companies would lead you to believe.

Plus, the most beneficial AI features seem to be the ones that were already there, before they were powered by AI. Getting a notification of the best route to take to work because of traffic works pretty much as it did when it wasn’t powered by AI, so is this feature now better because now it is? Don’t Google Maps and Waze already do this and are they now inferior?

It’s clear that AI is here to stay, but outside of the wild things you can do with it, like image and video generation, some phone features being replaced with AI-powered versions don’t seem to be that much better than what we’ve been working with already.

How to turn off Galaxy AI services

gai — You can turn off most Galaxy AI features off with a couple of taps.

Nelson Aguilar

Some of the features that smartphones can do using AI are undeniably cool. If you like some of the AI features your phone can do but don’t want it everywhere, Samsung will allow you to pick and choose what takes advantage of it.

To turn off AI for individual services:

Go to Settings
Tap Galaxy AI
Select the service you want to disable
Tap the toggle to off

You’ll see a list of the services that form Galaxy AI. You can choose the apps for which you want to turn AI on or off from here.

If you’re more privacy minded but still want to take advantage of Galaxy AI features, there’s a toggle at the bottom of this screen that will limit AI from sending anything to the cloud and keep data processing on your device only. Going for this option will disable some AI features altogether that require the internet to process, and results may be less useful.

Goodbye, Bixby

Samsung settings replace bixby voice assistant — Samsung luckily makes it easy for your to ditch Bixby for another voice assistant.

Nelson Aguilar

Bixby, the Samsung digital assistant that you may not even realize is on your phone, is something that you’ll want to disable if you’re trying to tame the AI on your Galaxy device.

Luckily, Samsung has a way for you to replace Bixby with another voice assistant of your choosing. For all intents and purposes, Google Assistant will be your best bet, even if it will eventually be replaced by Google’s advanced AI assistant somewhere down the road.

It’s likely already installed on your phone, but you might need to redownload the Google app if you uninstalled it before or never had it.