Turns Out Perplexity Might Be the Sleeper Feature on Samsung's Rumored Galaxy S26

It’s be easy to assume there will be a lot of mentions of AI at today’s Galaxy Unpacked event. Nearly every major phone launch over the past few years has seen announcements of new AI capabilities or partnerships between phone-makers and AI companies.

News broke over the weekend that the next version of Galaxy AI, likely debuting on the rumored Galaxy S26 phones expected to be announced at today’s event, would integrate Perplexity’s AI agent and even support a “Hey Plex” wake word. But it seems there’s more to the partnership than just giving Samsung phone owners a choice of AI agents.

Since late 2023, phone-makers have been leapfrogging each other, adding new generative AI features or integrating AI agents. Nearly every new Android phone supports Google’s Gemini assistant. Apple’s iPhones integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into the phone’s Visual Intelligence feature, and its Siri overhaul will incorporate Google’s Gemini AI models.

While Perplexity has had partnerships with phone-makers such as Motorola to have its app preloaded, and it’s been integrated into handsets for Deutsche Telekom, having its AI and models baked into the phones by the biggest phone-maker in the world puts the company on a much bigger stage. It marks a shift toward AI agents being just another tool people choose to use, much like a phone app.

“The first step toward an agentic…