Trick to enable Samsung Internet AI features on non eligible devices shut down

Galaxy AI brought a handful of AI features to Samsung Internet called Browsing Assist, this includes webpage summarization, translation, and Read Aloud. These features are officially available only on supported devices but someone recently found a trick to enable them on non eligible devices, including budget devices like the Galaxy A15.

It appears Samsung didn't like that, so it has released a new update for the Samsung Internet browser that shuts down the trick used to enable those features.

Browsing Assist has some useful functionality. For example, it translates everything from the menus on the webpage to even the text in embedded videos. The translations aren't overlaid, rather, the original text is replaced with the translated version so the final result looks very polished.

The trick to enable these features appeared on Reddit, which involved changing some settings in the browser's debug menu to enable Browsing Assist. There's no device hardware limitation for these features because all of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud.

The company has now released an update for its browser, Samsung Internet version 28.0.0.59, which reportedly shuts down this workaround that allowed users to enable Browsing Assist. In theory, non eligible devices would be able to easily provide access to Browsing Assist because all of the processing for translation or summarization is being done off-device in the cloud.

It's likely Samsung wants to keep the Galaxy AI experience limited to retain differentiation between its budget/mid-range and premium segments.