Vietnamese Pride
On January 18, Samsung opened a new era on mobile devices when equipping a series of features from Galaxy AI on the Galaxy S24 product line. The applause was endless in the Unpacked 2024 auditorium when Mr. Drew Blackard - Head of Product Management, Samsung Electronics America - demonstrated the direct translation feature on the device. Halfway around the world, in Hanoi, Tran Tuan Minh - Head of AI language research team and the team of engineers at Samsung Vietnam Research and Development Center (SRV) were also anxiously following every development of the event. Dinh Thang and his colleagues were anxiously waiting for a proud milestone to be announced.
"Everyone was overwhelmed when Drew Blackard introduced the first languages supported by the GenAI translation feature on the Galaxy S24. Vietnamese appeared on stage with the first 12 languages supported by this feature. An atmosphere of pride enveloped the entire center," Tuan Minh said.
Drew Blackard announces the world's first languages powered by Galaxy AI at Unpacked 2024, including Vietnamese
According to Samsung's R&D engineer, this is not only a personal pride when the contributions of Vietnamese people are recognized, but also a national pride when Vietnamese becomes the main language group prioritized for development on a top Samsung product. "That means Vietnamese users will be the first customers to experience the latest technologies, in their mother tongue and will be greatly supported from daily life tasks to work," said Tuan Minh.
Four months of racing
According to Mr. Tran Tuan Minh, in the past, when a new feature was developed at research centers, Vietnamese was often not prioritized for development. But since the Hanoi R&D Center came into operation, the role of Vietnamese engineers has changed a lot. The project of bringing Vietnamese to GenAI features right from the first launch is both a source of pride and a challenge for the Vietnamese engineering team. Normally, engineers need at least 6 months to 1 year to develop large-language AI, but the SRV engineering team did this in just 4 months before Galaxy Unpacked 2024.
"It was an extremely big challenge. For 4 months, we continuously flew back and forth between Vietnam and R&D centers in Korea and India to work with engineers to build a Vietnamese data set with corresponding text to 'teach AI' to speak and understand Vietnamese," Tuan Minh shared.
Engineer Tran Tuan Minh and his team of engineers implemented the AI project.
Those working in AI understand that the biggest challenge for engineers is that the data for teaching AI in Vietnamese is very limited compared to English or other popular languages. The input quality is also very limited because AI is still a new field in Vietnam. The lack of raw data and low quality will directly affect the accuracy of AI output. Therefore, before starting to "teach AI to speak Vietnamese", Tuan Minh and his colleagues sat down to analyze the existing data, identifying the "holes" to improve. For example, low-quality English translations will be reprocessed to ensure the best quality.
After solving the input for the translation module, we continued to discover another challenge of Vietnamese which is the dialectal nature, the characteristics of each region are very different. Besides, the process of training AI and working with language experts made SRV engineers realize another big problem: Vietnamese in daily life is changing a lot compared to the previously updated data warehouse. In other words, the slang of GenZ, of Internet users or the names of movies, celebrities, international events are updated by young people every day. Therefore, the R&D team also has to update this data for AI.
At the same time, test engineers also have to go to real-life environments to test the real-life performance of AI in many different conditions. SRV engineers sometimes go to Hoan Kiem Lake, take the bus, go to a coffee shop... to test in real-life environments, ensuring that GenAI can operate most accurately in all conditions.
Engineer Tran Tuan Minh and the engineering team regularly meet to discuss during the project implementation process.
The process of taking a new product from the research lab to the hands of end users always has to go through an important stage: testing. "Although SRV is the largest center outside of Korea responsible for testing network devices, we faced a big challenge because SRV's test engineers at that time did not know much about AI," Tuan Minh recalled. Within 4 months, SRV received technology and experience in AI testing from Korean engineers. Everyone studied while working and raced against time to bring Vietnamese to Galaxy AI in time for the Unpacked event. According to Tuan Minh, from zero in AI testing, Vietnamese engineers now not only test all features on Galaxy AI but also transfer technology, testing processes and experience to engineers in the Southeast Asia region.
Samsung's business philosophy and long-term commitment in Vietnam
The above stories show Samsung's commitments and practical actions in Vietnam. Not only has Samsung made efforts to make Vietnamese one of the first 13 languages supported on Galaxy AI, but it has also made efforts to transfer the latest and most modern technologies to Vietnamese engineers. This has kept its promise to the Vietnamese Government when it was determined to make Vietnam go beyond its role as a production base to become Samsung's strategic R&D base globally.
Overview of Samsung Vietnam R&D Center
Since its inception, the Research and Development Center has maintained Samsung's business philosophy that the company's development always accompanies the general development of society. SRV pays special attention to cooperation with universities to attract domestic talent and accompany the development of information technology in Vietnam. From cooperation in the software field, Samsung Vietnam has expanded cooperation to the hardware field and courses related to new technologies such as AI, Big Data, IoT, etc.
Mr. Choi Joo Ho, General Director of Samsung Vietnam Complex, commented that the new features on Samsung's Galaxy AI today have a great contribution from Vietnamese engineers. From the effort to make Vietnamese one of the first languages supported by the GenAI feature to Vietnamese engineers researching and transferring the latest technologies to engineers in the region, SRV is showing the sweet fruits of cultivating talents in more than 20 years of Samsung's presence in Vietnam. This is not only Samsung's commitment to Vietnamese users but also important contributions in technology transfer, talent training, making Vietnam one of the important bases in the region and the world.
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