Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/with-apple-intelligence-on-the-horizon-a-quarter-of-smartphone-owners-are-unimpressed-by-ai/

by retskrad • 2 years ago

324 330 2 years ago

cnet.com

brtkdotse• 2 years ago

Never mind AI, I just want Siri to have better text-to-speech quality than my freaking vacuum cleaner.

NotYourLawyer• 2 years ago

That’s AI though…

JohnMakin5• 2 years ago

It's incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to avert my attention from the road, disconnect my phone, then plug it back in and pull my map up again.

She can't do or understand the most astoundingly basic stuff. I guess maybe it "feels" worse now because most LLM's are pretty good at understanding your meaning/intention, but my god, it's so bad that if I were in charge of that product I'd rip it out entirely. There's no way anyone finds any real use out of it.

immibis2• 2 years ago

FWIW you were not forced to distract yourself from the road - officially, you should have got off the freeway at the next exit and parked before sorting stuff out.

bluGill8• 2 years ago

Even if everything worked you should not be trying to do that while driving. Keep your attention on the road - you are in control of several tons of metal moving at deadly speeds. (don't sing a long with the radio either)

ziml772• 2 years ago

You could have just given it a time and canceled it later when it was safe to. No need to endanger others on the road for this.

jermaustin1• 2 years ago

I need better speech to text. I have to repeat my text message 5+ times sometimes when sending it through carplay. I'm not talking about anything long either. A handful of words that my accent just doesn't work with. More than once per day I get fed up enough to pull over and text it.

xp845• 2 years ago

Hey now, Siri’s speech-to-text quality is also worse quality than a vacuum cleaner’s too.

yellow_lead• 2 years ago

And the vacuum cleaner really sucks

binarymax• 2 years ago

It’s gotta be just barely holding on in some legacy environment right now. I’m surprised they don’t just start over using new tech. Maybe that’s the end goal with on-device inference to sunset cloud Siri.

grahamj5• 2 years ago

I think it’s at least partly cost reduction. Push everything to the phone so people have to pay more for phones and they pay less for infra. Win-win.

Otherwise why don’t they let older devices use their server-side private LLM setup?

neither_color• 2 years ago

I have a bunch of "premium" smart outlets(eve energy, some are "THREAD" enabled, all the bells and whistles) all named and connected to things I want to toggle with voice: a small radiator, an air purifier, a humidifier, some accent lamps, a fan, an infrared therapy lamp etc. -Before anyone asks, I ordered the European version of their energy strip for higher wattage stuff-. I give each one a clear and unambiguous name, and still, at least one in ten times Siri will be confused about what I'm asking and turn off EVERY SINGLE OUTLET IN THE ROOM. It's endlessly frustrating. For what it's worth the outlets never de-sync or disconnect like the random amazon ones do so I blame it purely on Siri.

techbrovanguard• 2 years ago

siri’s speech recognition and intent handling is so comically bad. as of late, for some unknown reason, when i ask siri to favourite the current song while driving it curtly replies that it doesn’t know which speaker i’m referring to. this used to work.

another fun problem is siri not recognising my speech despite me not having a particularly strong accent, speaking slowly, and enunciating. i’ve gotten into the habit putting on a valley girl or bbc news anchor voice while using siri since that usually works.

whoever is in charge of siri needs a reality check, the feature is borderline unusable.

mondobe• 2 years ago

I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before.

From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?

kspacewalk2• 2 years ago

I've set a reminder through Gemini, then tried to change its time. Told me there are no active reminders to change. Created another reminder with correct time. Got both reminders.

blackoil• 2 years ago

I asked if to create task for Monday morning. It created one, Monday 12AM.

larntz• 2 years ago

I have a Pixel also, and have issues with is since the change to Gemini. It works _most_ of the time, but every once in a while it'll tell me it can't set a reminder.

I use reminders often so I suppose it is a low failure rate.

But, when they first made the change to Gemini I had to switch back for a few weeks/months before it could set reminders properly.

bluGill8• 2 years ago

I want the reminder not on my device, but on my work computer which I'll be staring at when I need the reminder. Or in the bananas case I want bananas sent to our shared family grocery app (which isn't a google service) so that if my wife happens to be going by a store tomorrow she knows to stop and get some along with flour or whatever else we need to stock up on.

xvector6• 2 years ago

"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?

literalAardvark• 2 years ago

That's agentic behaviour, and the first to offer it publicly are anthropic, who just opened a beta.

It's still pretty terrible though

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

I think your example highlights why this kind of "everyday AI" would be nearly impossible. If my phone automatically rescheduled my appointments and notified my contacts, without my explicit direction, I would be pissed as all hell. There are some "confirmation" notifications that could assist here ("We noticed your flight is delayed - would you like to reschedule these appointments?"), but even then, I'd say the majority of notifications I get these days are annoying and I spend a ton of time trying to figure out how to turn off annoying notifications while not totally silencing ones I depend upon. I'd have a difficult time believing that AI systems wouldn't just add to my list of over-burdensome notifications.

vineyardmike• 2 years ago

I worked on a (failed) system that was supposed to help with this in the pre-ChatGPT era. The obvious limitations is getting the data, and scaling that to everyone. Learning about your flights, staying up to date on them, etc is such a daunting privacy-busting task that everyone is scared to start. Either you go use-case by use-case (flights, restaurants, calendars… etc) and never get traction or you just start scanning emails and open up huge data risks.

Today, this is nearly available, nearly. Probably only something Google/apple can realistically offer. Apple “intelligence” has started to read your notifications and rewrite them for you, so it shouldn’t be a big leap to listen for a United App notification and decide it’s urgent enough take action. Should be “trivial” for Google to do as well, and they could even run it server side to help without a phone present.

altdataseller• 2 years ago

1. How does it know how/when to reschedule that doctor's appointment that you need to call to reschedule? How do you know that receptionist won't hang up on your "AI agent" who tries to call them, b/c they think it's some sort of scam bot?

2. How does it know which contacts to contact? Does that acquaintance you talked to for some professional reason need to know your flight got rescheduled? What about that travel agency you talked to last night to confirm the flight?

kredd3• 2 years ago

The problem is, vast majority of smartphone usage is done for entertainment and social networking purposes (IG, TikTok, Twitter, HN, gaming, Netflix and etc.). If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming, I can’t imagine how current AI tooling can help you other than some summarization of texts. Sure, for productivity cases it might be legitimate, but that’s not what supermajority of people use a phone for.

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

No, the problem is that "AI" just isn't any good at almost anything.

paul79863• 2 years ago

Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search

Some personal examples of how I find it more useful (love to hear yours) and fun to use....

- Wanted to go on a hike an hour away from where both my friend (lives two hours west of me) and I live. Asked GPT what are some good hikes an hour drive away from both of us to meet & hike. With Google I have to do Many searches where GPT just provides the answer right away.

- I count calories and eat out everyday. GPT knows the calories of everything i eat as I eat at chains mostly (Cava, Panera, Starbucks, Chipolte). I tell it via voice what i just ate for my 1st meal, it calculates my calorie count and later I'll tell it what im having for my 2nd meal. It can also recall my calorie count from days ago. It does all this quickly vs. Google i'd have to do oodles of searches.

Usually Im using GPT the most when driving via voice and unlike Siri, GPT understands me and i can have whole conversations with it to get things done while driving.

rbanffy5• 2 years ago

If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming

Imagine an AI that popped up when you are reading something and warned you that information is false.

For instance, imagine something like https://theconversation.com/can-ai-talk-us-out-of-conspiracy... helping people discern about news and propaganda.

est31• 2 years ago

Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty. People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.

artwr• 2 years ago

I know that's true, but I find that the images on my Pixel are starting to have a bit of an eery feel, with some of the details looking more and more like AI generated images. I'd give back a bit of the quality for more "natural" looking images.

ARandomerDude• 2 years ago

Right but in street surveys nobody knows that. Most people just call it "better camera."

no_wizard6• 2 years ago

Interpretation of this on its nose suggest the algorithms are the core feature not AI, as there is no artificial intelligence involved in these processes that I’m aware of.

If you actually peak under the hood they just pass through weighted selectors, no different than a switch statement

romwell• 2 years ago

Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty

Nah.

Smartphone cameras stopped being shitty a while ago, long before AI and computational photography hacks.

What you mean to say is they without AI, you'd know sooner that the smartphone maker put a cheap, shitty camera in your "premium" phone.

People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.

Yeah, it's also fake image generation featuring humans with a funny number of fingers.

What AI isn't is a camera.

candiddevmike2• 2 years ago

How do I disable that?

I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced. Maybe it's time to get back into Polaroids.

candiddevmike2• 2 years ago

Changing to Gemini broke all of my smart home commands. Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.

crustaceansoup• 2 years ago

It also sometimes asks to unlock my phone for commands that plain old Assistant was happy to do while locked. I haven't really found it useful at all yet, free ChatGPT is just better than free Gemini for "LLM stuff" and Google Assistant is better for "smart home stuff"

connicpu• 2 years ago

I've been thinking about trying the OpenAI integration for home assistant[1], because controlling things in my home is primarily what I use my assistant shortcut for. The normal assistant works well enough but can be frustrating if you don't remember the exact phrasing it wants to activate a certain command.

[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/openai_conversati...

lolinder3• 2 years ago

I've heard horror stories and have held off so far in 'upgrading'. In the end I don't really want the fully flexible responses people are leaning into with these llm tools. All I want is to be able to give a precise instruction with my voice and have the machine reliably perform the action that it performed the last time I gave that instruction.

Since that seems to be an increasingly niche desire (at least as far as the product managers are concerned), I've been looking more and more seriously at setting up my own local voice assistant. My main barrier has been hardware—the mic arrays in the Home devices are surprisingly good and hard to beat with cheap off-the-shelf components, and you need a good mic for good STT.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.

Teach a man to fish!

grahamj5• 2 years ago

95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT

True, but it is an external service with all the privacy concerns that entails. I appreciate eg. Apple pushing local AI but at the same time I don’t think it needs to ship with the OS. Just provide an AI API apps can hook into then I can decide which models I want and where they run.

swatcoder2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure that's true. Not everybody is hounding for information from the web in the first place.

Apple's approach of using current-boom AI to help you navigate and digest your own private trove of multimedia content (photos, videos, apps, notes, structured data, etc) is absolutely useful to people as well, and for some of us, one of the only personal uses of this AI that seems compelling at all.

I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick.

But these features have to work, and work well, and work fast, and be widely known to work, before they'll really win the market. But that's going to take a minute and it might not even happen.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

Yeah, it seems based on the advertising from the various AI vendors, they are showing its use by summarizing emails/phone call/etc. Things like being able to search text messages for info blah blah. The only one I've seen pushing online searches is Google, but that seems like duh! for them to be pushing. Circle something in an image and take me to a listing of that something for sale. Of course that's Google's direction.

But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal

itsoktocry2• 2 years ago

I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick.

Hasn't Google been doing this forever? I can search random things in my photos (like pictures of an old car I owned).

okasaki• 2 years ago

It's great for spooks too. Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.

ffsm82• 2 years ago

The only thing that changed for me was a that it couldn't control my smart Home devices anymore, nor activate navigation, nor send messages via Whatsapp (I.e. while driving).

Literally every thing I used it for got answered via "I cannot do that yet" after it randomly opted me into that. Pure garbage.

piyush_soni• 2 years ago

Then why are you using it? I tried using Gemini once on my Pixel 6. Couldn't play music on Youtube music on verbal instructions, I switched back to Google Assistant. Will try it again after 6 months now. :)

addaon2• 2 years ago

95% of everyday AI needs

This assumes that the capabilities and use cases are unchanged. Yes, for the AI features available today, I suppose ChatGPT can do much of it -- I wouldn't know because it's not interesting or useful to me, so I don't use it.

But: If I'm deciding whether AI features are important to me in making a decision to spend money on a future phone, it's those future AI features that I will be assessing.

95% of my everyday needs for an external intelligence (besides my own) are covered by e-mail, text, and phone calls with other humans, with a trivial portion covered by nascent AI features. As this changes, and AI gets more capable of replacing human intelligence in these interactions (TBD if this happens in the next smartphone generation, or the next human generation, or further in the future), then I will /very much/ care that the electronic device that I use most often day-to-day has access to these capabilities, and will very much use access to those capabilities as part of deciding where to spend my money.

njtransit• 2 years ago

You seriously assess "future AI features" when buying a phone? Have you heard the expression "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"? Also, what is the lifetime of a phone? How far in the future are these new features expected?

HumblyTossed2• 2 years ago

Apple will just tell you you need an iPhone 17 because it has a more special "you're gonna love it" neural thingy onboard, and so your purchase of a 16 is null.

jefftk• 2 years ago

the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders

Weird! Mine can still create reminders, as well as set timers and alarms.

rbanffy5• 2 years ago

AI’s appeal depends a lot on the features. Battery is important for me (more than being anorexically thin), but I would love an AI that could screen my calls like a smart voice mail that asks questions.

Also, being able to talk to my mailbox asking questions about subjects mentioned in my e-mails would be a huge time saver.

Imagine a purely local Microsoft Recall-like thing that could answer questions about things you saw, or that read the news articles you went over quickly and answer complicated questions about them much later, at a time you just started to regret not having bookmarked it for future reading.

the_arun• 2 years ago

AI is usually about implementation details. Customers typically worry about solutions to problems. They don't care how solution is implemented - using AI or not.

Terr_2• 2 years ago

Perhaps a step further: I do not need my phone to tell me an LLM-generated bedtime story involving a specified cast of characters, I just want it to reliably control existing functionality, dangit.

Like when a timed alarm is making the phone buzz in my pocket while I'm driving, I'm telling it to silence the alarm, and the response-voice is regretfully informing me that there are no alarms going off right now.

tracerbulletx• 2 years ago

For it to have value they need to effectively apply it for something useful and have it be reliable, not just go hey we have llms. like if i could say siri share my location with my wife and text her "im on my way" oh and send her a pic of what im looking at through my sunglasses. And it worked 99% of the time, and could figure out to do it through google maps because she has android, that would be great.

chankstein383• 2 years ago

And, to me, none of that even sounds like AI. Just an assistant app, smart glasses, and google maps not being shit. I can't think of a reason, other than the reasons I already use ChatGPT and the AI object eraser, that I would need AI on my phone. Most of the crap they pump out is just a solution looking for a problem.

xp845• 2 years ago

Exactly. I remember imagining naively in 2010 that the introduction of Siri meant I would be able to just ask my phone to do simple things like update settings or manipulate the built-in apps using natural language, things chatGPT could easily do even a year ago if it had the needed API hooks. Including doing things on a schedule, compound sentences, etc. Instead we got a very brittle text adventure that can neither correctly transcribe your words, let alone understand your intention, and it’s never even changed.

“Siri get me directions to McDonald’s” ‘I found this on the web for you:’ <serp for “Direct In Donald”>

Or it would get directions to a McDonalds in a different state. Or say “I’m sorry, I don’t see a McDonald in your contacts.”

brianshaler• 2 years ago

I'd rather have flagship specs in a smaller package. The smallest in the iPhone (SE) and Pixel ("A"?) lines are still too big and tend to have previous-gen specs

dwayne_dibley• 2 years ago

Same boat. 'upgraded' my iphone mini to a 15 and hate it. Far far to big.

tra33• 2 years ago

I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini.

I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.

efficax• 2 years ago

there are dozens of us! dozens!!! i’m also keeping my 13 mini until it’s dead

diggan2• 2 years ago

I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini.

I literally was in the Apple store yesterday for the same purpose (with a 12 mini). I'd also love the new features and hardware, but after trying all the available sizes in the store, they're all too big.

My wife on the other hand(s), loves to have a phone she needs to hold with two hands to even be able to use, so obviously she has the Pro Max. I don't understand how people are OK with that, but to each and their own...

jihadjihad• 2 years ago

I need a new battery in my 2020 SE as well, I wasn't aware that the last mini was a 13. Bring 'em back!

vvladymyrov5• 2 years ago

Good luck. I’ve tried to replace battery in mine 12 mini last week - with no success. I had to leave my phone for 4 hours or several days (if they brake screen during battery replacement, they will wait for replacement phone to be shipped overnight). Also representative was convincing me to buy a new phone - saying that battery replacement won’t help much because new ios versions has features which high battery usages, while newer iphones has larger battery and hardware optimizations for these new features. I’m thinking about iPhone 16 now while keeping iPhone 12 mini as backup phone.

shafyy• 2 years ago

I just replaced the battery in my iPhone SE 2nd gen last month. Somehow I didn't know that that was possible. Best 80 € spent ever.

mmmore• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, people don't buy small phones as much.

https://youtu.be/iR9zBsKELVs?si=3o1qD-4R7lyezZwt

bluGill8• 2 years ago

There are a lot of different phones. People don't buy Sony as much as Samsung.

dageshi3• 2 years ago

I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.

iscrewyou• 2 years ago

It’s a package of devices Apple is selling. They sell under powered smaller screen macs. They sell iMacs. They sell small iPads. They sell smaller watches. Some of these just don’t sell as well as their other offerings.

They should sell small phones. Because the whole family will be in on the brand, features, and services. I’ve heard many family members and friends say that they won’t give up their older small phones because Apple no longer makes new ones.

The idea that they don’t sell well is not a good enough reason when you are trying to capture the whole market for not just hardware but the lock in for services, apps, games, music, etc.

ktosobcy2• 2 years ago

Because the execution is usually borked... I was eyeig ZenFone 9 (or something around that) and what? It was reported that it had problem with overheating and build quality.

What's more, I would love something akin to my current Galaxy a52s 5G with a display around 5.2-5.5" (I first had LG G2, then OnePlus3 which was already a bit bulky and now a52 as compromise; https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5543&idPhone2...)...

I do have iPhone SE (2022) and it's the size of LG G2 and I find quite handy. Something of that size but with slightly bigger screen (better screen-to-body ratio). Specs doesn't have super-hiper-premium… and the price should be sane (usually compact phones are like 20-40% higher, sic)

HumblyTossed2• 2 years ago

I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.

The iPhone mini was a billion dollar device. Anyone other than Apple would have called that a success.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

"Well enough" is doing a lot of work here. It's not that they aren't successful, it's that they aren't immediate, runaway hits, so the manufacturers conclude: why bother trying to build this market, let's just go back to the playbook. That's how you get mediocre products, which is where we are now.

gen220• 2 years ago

Speaking for myself, I 100% would have bought an iPhone Mini, but I purchase new phones on a 5-6 year cycle. My iPhones were the 4S and the XS.

Now that I'm ready to buy a new iPhone, the Mini has been discontinued! I think the Mini would have been and in fact was successful, but it's not successful "enough" to justify a separate model – they must have observed that people "like me" would still buy a flagship iPhone, even though we aren't 100% satisfied with the form factor.

Apple would rather have us buying a higher-margin flagship model and have an NPS of 65+ than a lower-margin mini model with an NPS of 80+.

My friend with similar instincts as me recently got a refurbished 13 Mini instead of the latest flagship. I'll probably get the flagship, because I value the satcom a little bit more than the form factor.

wruza3• 2 years ago

Don’t produce it in the same volumes then?

Did you know that factories make less big-sized and small-sized shoes than average-sized ones? Because (surprise) buyers size distribution is not uniform.

“We tried to make big shoes many times and it doesn’t sell well enough”. Oh, really. I guess I’ll just cut holes for my fingers then.

SirMaster• 2 years ago

Just because the sentiment is a minority doesn't mean it's not an honest sentiment.

I also would love a smaller flagship spec'd phone.

I know it wont be popular, but I still want it.

LtWorf2• 2 years ago

By "it has been tried" you mean that they sold some crappy phone for almost the same price as a way better one?

knallfrosch• 2 years ago

Smaller components cost more than bigger ones and the mini users (me included) also want to spend less, not more.

tharant2• 2 years ago

I feel like many of the commenters in this thread are asking (sometimes demanding) that their devices offer a duality that can’t be met; do you want smaller phones or do you want longer battery life with more compute? At the moment, those are mutually exclusive goals. Thermodynamics can be a PITA but we’re doing (almost) the best we can.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

Alternate hed: 99% of smartphone buyers have no idea which features are supported by machine inference.

voxadam• 2 years ago

99% of smartphone buyers have no idea what machine inference is.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

So why are we surveying them on "AI"?

mouse_• 2 years ago

I would pay extra to -not- have AI in my phone. AI belongs on mainframes, out of my way when I don't want it.

xp845• 2 years ago

This is an underrated take. Apple, especially, wants to leverage their excellent silicon to do “AI” locally in the name of privacy purely as a marketing advantage, but the tradeoffs there are major (burning my battery instead of data center AC power, plus, my phone will never be better or faster than some big metal GPU with fans), and the privacy issue could just as well be solved by doing a good job designing the server side architecture and educating people that unlike when talking to a person, it’s trivial for a model to “not learn anything from” a conversation, and that that’s in fact automatically how it works unless you’re logging the conversations and purposely feeding them back in.

xvector6• 2 years ago

You can use their cloud instead of local compute if you'd like: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Building a privacy aware cloud is a lot harder than you think it is. Apple is going the whole way with remote attestation, hardware root of trust, software BOM, etc.

https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/

JadeNB2• 2 years ago

The problem is that remote solutions to the privacy problem inevitably involve my trusting someone else's privacy assurances. On-device processing reduces the trust required, although of course it doesn't eliminate it.

The common response to this is to point out that I'm trusting Apple or Google anyway just by using their phones, which is true, but (1) since phones are directly accessible to security researchers, there's more potential to find out about malfeasance if data is exfiltrated from the phone in a way that it shouldn't be, and (2) even if I have complete trust in Apple or Google, I also have to trust that they'll be able to protect my data from malicious actors, and, the less data I give them, the less I have to worry when they fail.

nerdjon• 2 years ago

My opinion is that most of the real uses of AI (like ML has always been) will be largely hidden things that are LLM based but not screaming at your face "AI". Particularly once the bubble pops and money stops being shoved into things just sticking an LLM in a pretty package with little to no value.

Some of the things coming in iOS like notification summaries and similar features are big examples. It's clearly LLM based but it's not a lot of the shoving AI needlessly into things that we are seeing now and provides a true improvement given the notification overload that we have right now.

slashdave2• 2 years ago

Photo manipulation is another example.

You can see the wisdom of how Apple is approaching this. In particular, to be on device whenever possible so as not to be dependent on network bandwidth, and to tie features to new hardware (to drive sales).

soco3• 2 years ago

How I wish this would actually work properly. One can have only so many sepia filters and cat ears before realizing photo manipulation still does the same it was doing ten years ago. I have yet to see an app actually improving the photo quality - and no, doubling the pixels is not that. Yes, you cannot create details where they are missing, but sometimes they should be obvious, like fixing the foliage (leaves in the distance always look like... leaves), trying to clarify the contours (not only by bumping the contrast) and I could go on. Yet no, every new AI-powered image processor only brings a new approach to sepia filters and adding cat ears.

KeytarHero• 2 years ago

Exactly. Ask customers "do you want AI in your phone?" and their response will probably be "meh", as shown in the article. But ask "do you want notification summaries, a better camera in low light, Siri to be able to look up more things, searchable photos, etc?" - and they absolutely will.

effingwewt• 2 years ago

Lol no one i know wants any of the things you mentioned.

Normies hate the AI hypetrain bullshit.

lopkeny12ko• 2 years ago

At this point I would pay a premium to have replaceable batteries again.

Syonyk7• 2 years ago

My Sonim XP3+ has a hard shell replaceable battery and lasts a week and a half on a charge. It's not even a very expensive device, it's under $150! ;) But it is a flip phone running Android Go with no apps...

That said, I think the tradeoffs being made right now are probably the right ones. Apple's latest devices have gone to an electrically released sort of adhesive (versus the older pull-strip removeable adhesive, which is a big step up from the "glue it in" approach many vendors take), and for a given volume, you get more battery if you can rely on the phone to protect it from damage - which is why almost everything with an internal battery uses some variety of pouch cell. They're quite a bit more fragile than the hard-cased batteries, but you get a lot more battery in the volume than you do with the hard cased ones.

As long as it's not incredibly irritating to replace the battery, I'm fine optimizing the daily use thing (battery life in a given phone size) over the once-every-few-years thing (replacing the battery).

ghaff• 2 years ago

Getting someone to replace a battery every 4 or 5 years really isn’t onerous. And for iPhones the magnetic batteries that attach to the back are a pretty effective way to stretch battery life a bunch more hours if you need to.

jollyllama• 2 years ago

Field-swappable is a must

ipsum2• 2 years ago

People think of chatGPT now when they hear AI, but for on-device its more like speech recognition, image keyword search, and keyboard next word prediction.

Syonyk7• 2 years ago

The biggest motivation for US adult smartphone owners to upgrade their devices is longer battery life (61%)...

Battery replacements are a thing. They're apparently not a common thing, unfortunately, because that might impact new phone sales... and even on devices where it's trivial, people don't seem to do it. A decade ago or so I was doing a lot of Nexus 5 battery swaps for people because one of the battery OEMs was shipping junk and the batteries were shot in a year.

I really wish OEMs would put bigger batteries in phones. It improves everything. Not only do you get longer initial battery life, you can handle far more "battery aging" before things stop working right. You still have a day's battery life (which I expect is what most people actually mean - they want their phone to last the day without thinking about it) even with capacity loss, and a larger battery can have more internal resistance increase (another factor of battery aging) before it sags too badly under the load to keep voltage up.

Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor (and those newer folding screen devices are massive when folded). Another few mm doesn't matter when phones live in purses, men's pockets, or jackets.

... or just go back to a modern flip phone sort of device, get a week and a half battery life, and stop worrying about remembering to charge your phone. ;)

Sohcahtoa82• 2 years ago

Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor

Everyone says this, but I wonder if the sales data says otherwise, because device manufacturers, especially Apple, REALLY love to advertise how thin their devices are.

Personally, I don't want a super thin device because I feel like the slightest bending force is going to snap it in half. It's absolutely wild to me that people will store their phones in their back pocket.

Syonyk7• 2 years ago

Apple's mobile division still seems to struggle with the ghost of Jony Ive. At least their laptop division was willing to rethink things with the Apple Silicon transition and go back to things that worked.

The late Intel-era portable Macs were simply broken, because of Ive's apparent obsession with "thin for thin's sake." Or, more probably, "thin for the sake of industrial design awards." They innovated 20% too much on keyboard design with the butterfly keyboard that was simply a bad design. I don't know what else to call a keyboard that reliably breaks after a few years of service. But, bad though that it is, it was even worse because you couldn't replace the keyboard. You had to replace the whole top case and battery, at something like $700, when one key went bad, because the whole thing was integrated to save a mm or two. Not only did they un-solve a solved problem (reliable laptop keyboards), they even un-solved the ability to replace a keyboard when it gets mangled, or something spills in it, or a random failure happens.

But, worse, they went with the USB-C only design (the thinnest port!), meaning that every owner of one of those laptops I knew had a pile of assorted adapters in their bag so they could do things that most people want to do every now and then with a laptop, like drive an external display for a presentation, read a USB-A storage device, or read a micro SD card. Yes, the laptop was thinner, but at the cost of needing to carry extra stuff with you to work around the lack of ports.

And then, because it was so thin, they didn't have space to properly cool the zorching-fast Intel chips they put in them, and the chips would throttle badly while baking the machine.

The M-series laptops, shocking me incredibly, threw all that "design" out the window, and went back to something actually useful. They cool well (admittedly, that's mostly the Apple Silicon barely needing cooling), they fixed the keyboard, and the machines have a useful set of ports on the side for "common tasks with a laptop" (SD, HDMI, headphone, plus the USB-C/Thunderbolt ports - still no A ports, though). And then enough battery to last just about forever.

Anyway, I hope their phone division works this sort of thing out too.

NoboruWataya2• 2 years ago

Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor

Well, people are probably going to put cases on their phone regardless, so the phone has to be thin enough that even with a case it's still a manageable size.

But I agree that battery is where phones ultimately fail most of the time. I have had a Samsung S10 for a bit over 5 years now and it is the battery that is going to force me to retire it and get a new one. Speed, storage, screen quality, camera quality are all perfectly fine for my use case. But the battery rarely lasts a full day with any kind of usage now which is annoying.

I would love a phone with a replaceable battery. But I agree that the average consumer won't bother, they will just get a new one (or they will have upgraded before battery life ever becomes an issue).

Syonyk7• 2 years ago

So replace the battery? It's not some impossible task.

https://www.ifixit.com/products/galaxy-s10-replacement-batte...

It's slightly annoying to replace, but even if you have a shop do it, it's far cheaper than a new phone.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Samsung+Galaxy+S10+Battery+Repl...

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

People didn't put cases on all phones at the time they could survive small falls and were thick enough to handle.

jandrese2• 2 years ago

IMHO the era of "we assume you're going to have a case on this" was cemented in place the instant the camera bump appeared. If you can't set you phone down on a service without it being all tippy thanks to the off center camera bump then you're clearly expected to stuff it into a case that is at least that thick.

jandrese2• 2 years ago

I just did a battery replacement on a Pixel 6a. It wasn't terribly expensive, $18 for the whole kit, but the process was very nerve wracking. Unlike Apple's relatively friendly rubber cement Google used some kind of industrial adhesive to glue everything together. You need a good amount of heat to loosen it, but not too much because that will damage the phone. There's a fine line. They do include a helpful strap for removing the battery, but you have that awful glue to deal with. The cherry on top is the slippery little spring clip connector you need to remove without damaging the board underneath.

All in all it made me pine for the days when you could just pop the back off of the phone and yank the battery out to replace it. Personally I think I could live with a 0.8mm thicker phone that still has this feature. Also a headphone jack while you are at it.

behnamoh2• 2 years ago

I've been trying the iOS Beta 18.2 and here's my impression of Apple Intelligence:

It's not bad, it's really really bad.

The image clean-up feature is utterly useless, and I think it's one of the areas where we can clearly see the difference between a company for whom Generative AI is an afterthought (Apple), and the competition. I paid $1500 for the new iPhone Pro Max and a great part of the deal was the Apple Intelligence support, but frankly, I might as well switch to Android at this point because I'm really disappointed at Apple's take on AI. I'll probably wait until the official Apple Intelligence is introduced but tbh I don't think there will be much improvements over this version.

And as for Siri: It's as stupid as it ever was. I ask it to convert something from lbs to kg and it responds "there's no music playing". If anything, its natural language comprehension has degraded.

Currently, there's no context awareness, so I still can't ask Siri "how do I respond to this email?".

Really, the only thing that "works" is the ChatGPT feature that describes an image you send it. Anything Apple-related is bonkers. It's really embarrassing.

xvector6• 2 years ago

Apple has always sucked in AI and they have never formed the culture necessary to enable and attract top ML talent. They developed Siri years ago and have stagnated since.

As far as the future of compute goes, Meta seems like it has a much more compelling argument with the Orion glasses and their investment in AI.

behnamoh2• 2 years ago

Apple has always sucked in AI

Yes, but Apple fans always respond by saying "...but Apple has been using ML in much of the OS for years, you just don't see it..."

I really want Apple to be better at this, but Generative AI is too uncontrollable for a control-freak company.

fhd2• 2 years ago

They didn't even develop Siri, they acquired it. Doesn't seem like they've done all that much with it beyond integrating and marketing it, but I could be wrong.

zomg• 2 years ago

what's a realistic use case for ai on a mobile phone? i have yet to find myself saying "gee, if only i had ai on my phone, i could do XYZ!"

diggan2• 2 years ago

I'd love it if CarPlay/Siri just could read out stuff it finds on the Internet. Currently, all I can get out of it is "Sorry, I cannot show this to you right now" for basically everything except trying to control multimedia.

At one point, I had ChatGPT working via voice in CarPlay mode (via Shortcuts I think?), but seems like Apple disabled that at one point, for some stupid reason probably.

1000100_10001012• 2 years ago

On iPhone, if I take a picture of a plant or animal, it identifies it for me. It's not 100% by any means, but it's useful enough. I've figured out what were baby plants I wanted vs. weeds. I've figure out species of birds I'd taken photos of with my SLR (ie: phone takes picture of Lightroom editing the image, and is able to identify it from that... I'd prefer there was a way to not require me to take a photo of my monitor, either doing it "live", and/or adding the functionality into the Mac.) For people and pets it can find other images that contain the same subject.

When my daughter was studying Chinese, I could use the live-video translation app and see the lesson text translated to English, and see her hand-written answers also translated to English. I could see this being more broadly useful when travelling, along with live translation of spoken words.

HWR_14• 2 years ago

While true your examples are AI, I believe in this case AI is being used in this context to mean LLM-based AI.

I don't know if LLM-based translation is better than previous translation models.

jazzyjackson• 2 years ago

I used Google lens yesterday to get the artist name of a painting I liked, that was neat.

Syonyk7• 2 years ago

That's not "on a phone," though. That's just schlepping an image up to the Google data center, and getting a result back. That you're using the phone as an interface to a datacenter doesn't make it "AI on the phone."

chankstein383• 2 years ago

The only one I use regularly is object replacement in photos. It's great for editing a street sign out of a picture of the sky or something, especially if you just don't want to dox yourself posting a pic. It's definitely not high quality most times. Just blurry redraw of what the background might look like.

Otherwise, totally with you. No idea why my phone needs AI. I can just open the ChatGPT app if I want to have a discussion with ChatGPT about something. I'm so tired of apps updating to "Add a new AI assistant!" like why do I need to talk to an LLM in most of the apps I use?

not_your_vase• 2 years ago

Well, I'm still waiting for an AI feature that recognizes my usage patterns, and adapts the system's behavior.

E.g. if it sees that I always reopen an application 2 seconds after the OS kills it in the background, then maybe it shouldn't be killed.

Or if I wake up 3 minutes before the alarm would go off, and take a trip to the toilet, maybe it shouldn't blow up the speaker while I'm frantically pulling up my underpants, but recognize that I'm already awake, or at least wait with the alarm until I'm around the phone again.

Or automatic backlight shouldn't go crazy when I walk in the night under the streetlamps, it should recognize that lamps are coming and going, and that backlight adjustment every 5 seconds is silly and annoying.

I could go on. IMO there is definitely a place for machine learning/AI in phones (and other places too), especially for quality of life thingies. Just nobody is doing them, I guess becacuse these are not as visible as image generation. My credit card has been ready to spend on such developments since at least 2021. One of these days I will have enough of waiting and do it myself, out of spite...

yunwal• 2 years ago

Spellcheck, voice control, voice-to-text, autocomplete and next-word-prediction are all some AI features that are already in use. Voice-to-text could certainly be much better if something like whisper was integrated. I pretty much never actually listen to voicemails, so having a reliable transcription there would be great.

I'd also love to be able to give commands that traverse multiple apps (e.g. take my google sheet and venmo request everyone the specified amount). Most likely this would happen by teaching an AI tool use and having apps expose an API.

I'd love to be able to give voice commands for certain things (e.g. flipping through recipes when my hands are wet) and have the phone be able to do the actual thing I want.

I actually think phones are a much better place for AI since they're so difficult to type on that voice could provide a higher-bandwidth interface.

jonathanlb• 2 years ago

One use case could be improving navigation directions. Right now, map apps provide granular, step-by-step instructions that include unnecessary details, such as how to exit your own neighborhood.

AI could provide more human-oriented direction that focus on key landmarks and decisions rather than every minor turn. For example:

"Hop on 80 West, cross the bridge, take Sir Francis Drake onto 101 South, take the Alexander Avenue exit, don't go through the tunnel, and your destination will be on the right."

NovaX• 2 years ago

It will likely become available for application developers to use. At work, we use it to assist warehouse checkins by allowing the guard to take photos of the truck, paperwork, seal, etc and fill out the forms going in and out. If built-in then it can be run on-device, so over time a lot more workflows can be seamless.

rcarmo• 2 years ago

Zero surprises here. I work with AI daily and am on the same boat.

JadeNB2• 2 years ago

What surprises me about the story is how weak the effect is, which is stripped by the title mangler: only 25% of users report not finding AI features helpful.

lexicality• 2 years ago

The foldable phone thing later in the article is fun, because I actually do want a foldable phone. I'd love to have a smaller phone with a screen that gets bigger for things like watching movies while traveling.

But the thing is, before buying one I borrowed one from a friend and it was absolute shit! The software hardly worked, the hinges felt horrible to open and it was still too big even when folded up. I thought I was going to break it constantly while holding it.

jonplackett3• 2 years ago

These stats seem like the reverse of the story in the headline

A quarter of smartphone owners (25%) don't find AI features helpful,

So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful?

45% are reluctant to pay a monthly subscription fee for AI capabilities

Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee?

34% have privacy concerns.

66% have no privacy concerns?

galleywest200• 2 years ago

The graph has multiple options for some of these.

45% unwilling to pay a monthly fee, 6% willing to pay a monthly fee.

devindotcom• 2 years ago

This data is in the article

So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful?

14% find it helpful

Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee?

6% are willing to pay

66% have no privacy concerns?

no stat on this but I think we can assume based on the others that it is not split evenly because that was not the methodology

WarOnPrivacy• 2 years ago

>66% have no privacy concerns?
no stat on this but...

I think we could presume an answer - if the respondents first received a full accounting of how their phones track and record their lives, along with a full list of who is getting that data.

jonplackett3• 2 years ago

Thanks. That’s clearer!

Ok my next comeback - people are treating AI tools like a musical instrument.

It’s like picking up a guitar for the first time, twanging a few strings and saying ‘Nah, this sounds shit’. Guitars are useless. I’d never pay for a guitar.

Even chatGPT has a learning curve. I save myself hours or days per day using it for all sorts of things. Anyone who says they can’t find a use for AI is just lazy and hasn’t tried hard.

Perz1val2• 2 years ago

You can't say that unless you've seen the test. Was it an Yes/No question, "check relevant to you", or "write how you feel about AI features"? It would change responses drastically

lolinder3• 2 years ago

The poll is very weirdly constructed. It looks like they gave people a set of checkboxes to check rather than asking people to rank their opinions on a scale.

25% checked the box saying they don't find AI tools helpful, but only 14% said they do. Which means 61% checked neither box.

45% are reluctant to pay, but only 6% said they were willing to. So again, 49% simply didn't say one way or the other.

12% straight-up didn't check any box at all.

grahamj5• 2 years ago

25% checked the box saying they don't find AI tools helpful, but only 14% said they do. Which means 61% checked neither box.

But why include people who didn’t pick anything? Surely they should be ignored and it ends up being 64/36.

II2II• 2 years ago

The article provides insufficent data to answer any of those questions, since "don't know" or "undecided" are frequently options in such surveys.

Yet they do provide sufficient information for the headline. AI integrations came in 7th place for considerations when upgrading a smartphone.

bluGill8• 2 years ago

Those stats are wrong in another way - everything is about tradeoffs. If the AI is really good I can pay a price to use it - the price depends on how good it is. If the AI is really good I can ignore some privacy concerns - not all but some (indeed in order to work it probably must ignore some privacy concerns)

jmugan• 2 years ago

I still can't control my iPhone with my voice in the car. Siri doesn't work well for me. Maybe there is another way I have missed, but I'm amazed this functionality is still lacking.

rishikeshs2• 2 years ago

Why can’t they make smaller phones?

slashdave2• 2 years ago

They can. It just that no one wants to buy them.

rishikeshs2• 2 years ago

Is it so? Everyone who sees my iphone 13 mini wants it. It’s going at crazy prices in the second hand market

jdalgetty• 2 years ago

We'll care more about AI when it's better.

jdlyga• 2 years ago

GPT-4o is helpful, and so is NotebookLM. The problem is that "AI" features built into a lot of products aren't that useful.

drivingmenuts• 2 years ago

In re: AI on my phone - it's sort of interesting, but really not worth having because it's not smart enough nor capable of being smart enough. It lacks "judgement", which is what I really needs, instead of slavish attention to detail coupled with hallucinations.

chankstein383• 2 years ago

I can understand why. Most of the generative AI crap we're being force-fed these days is a solution looking for a problem. On my Samsung, the only really useful AI features they provide are erasing things in photos and upscaling. The generation is weak compared to even basic stable diffusion and otherwise they're all fluff features and sometimes give me the same vibes as the "Make Longer" feature on Notion. As far as apps go, I really don't need a chatbot in every app.

agentultra• 2 years ago

I actively don’t want AI, on-device or not. But with the near monopolies on these devices there isn’t a way to vote with your wallet. We’re getting whether we want it or not.

hkon• 2 years ago

You can have a dumb phone. If you require one for 2fa. Just have one in addition for that purpose. But you can also sms 2fa on many services

goblinux• 2 years ago

The hard part with 2FA over SMS is that it's no longer considered secure [1]. I want a dumb phone too, but with all the security tools we need (password manager, 2FA apps/tokens, encrypted messaging, etc.) it's becoming less and less an option for me.

I wish there was a middle ground where I could have my phone be dumb enough to keep me from playing on it all the time, but secure enough that it makes sense for me.

[1] https://www.okta.com/blog/2020/10/sms-authentication/ I'm not affiliated with them, just the first article I found on the topic

meindnoch• 2 years ago

I don't want a dumb phone. I want a smartphone without AI crap.

m01• 2 years ago

For 2FA try a Yubikey or similar hardware U2F device.

(opinion my own)

CharlieDigital• 2 years ago

I think the mistake a lot of companies are making with their approach to AI is making AI some "other" interface that you have to interact with explicitly. This chat bot approach is only one paradigm for using AI and it's probably the worst one in most use cases.

Amazon Rufus, for example, falls into this category and it's hard to even remember to engage with it. On the other hand, Amazon is happy to serve me absolute trash search results.

What most people probably want is an AI that can, for example, help organize their calendar transparently. Have a meeting coming up with a client? What if the AI can use tools to go find the latest info about the client? Check their LinkedIn, check their X, check their blog, research their company, give you a tear sheet on topics to discuss based on this in the calendar notes. If a user has to directly interact and instruct the AI, it feels like it defeats the purpose.

aithrowawaycomm• 2 years ago

It has been especially frustrating to read about Apple Intelligence on my 2022 iPhone with iOS Safari, where some JavaScript bugs that have been around since 2012 seem to be slightly worse in the latest update, and occasionally the entire app just freezes for no good reason, even if I've closed all other tabs. Not to mention how often I have to reset my entire 2021 iPad because the audio drivers get into a bad state.

I suppose "stability improvements in WebKit" doesn't do much for Apple's stock price compared to SiriGPT. But this is feeling like death-by-1000-cuts: I don't think users are deeply committed to Apple UX/etc. I believe Apple's US market dominance is largely due to burnt fingers around Android's unreliability and annoyances between 2010-2020 (e.g. Google and Samsung not playing nice, badly orchestrated version changes). This was never a permanent state of affairs; Android has stabilized significantly and is more harmonized among competing manufacturers, while retaining its advantages on price and ease of development.

Apple seems complacent on the basics, and is overextending into an AI product few users seem to want.

FireSquid2006• 2 years ago

Man I really just want email, texting, and a web browser on my phone. More "stuff" to do is an anti feature for me.

hollandheese• 2 years ago

Maybe Apple actually had it right with the first iPhone. No apps, just e-mail, texting and a good web browser.

akho2• 2 years ago

I want maps, a taxi/bike rental app, banking, notes, a camera, a music player, tickets for stuff, and a TOTP gizmo.

You’ll say I can do most of that in a browser, but then you’ve just moved complexity around.

ricardobeat• 2 years ago

A bit of a chicken and egg problem, isn’t it? Since really useful AI feature’s don’t really exist yet, why would one expect the general public to want it?

Check again in six months.

aiono2• 2 years ago

AI companies are desperately trying to find actual use cases but it seems like there is not that much to justify current investment.

amateuring• 2 years ago

bingo

Nicholas_C• 2 years ago

Sounds a little like crypto although there are actual use cases for AI. Just not as many as investors think.

changing19993• 2 years ago

It's very similar in regards to treating the increase in compute power consumption as a signal of "growth".

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

There are lots and lots of use cases for good AI.

Those LLMs we have around just aren't that.

bobro• 2 years ago

It’s been enough time now that we should really have a handful of very clear use cases, but we just don’t.

GuB-42• 2 years ago

Here, it is more like the smartphone market is stagnating and manufacturers need something to encourage people to buy new smartphones instead of keeping the one they already have.

They are already doing planned obsolescence, with hard to replace batteries, limited software support combined with closed systems, etc... But they can't abuse it, as regulatory agencies are already after them and customers are starting to notice. They had a go with cameras, as it is a significant differentiator, but nowadays, most smartphone cameras are as good as they can be for what they are used for.

And it turns out that AI is the big hype right now, so of course, they are using as a selling point.

The funny part is that "AI" (machine learning techniques) have been running in smartphones for a while (I'd say a decade), hidden in camera software. How do you think these tiny cameras can do pictures that look so good? But they mostly kept quiet about it, as it had implications of making "fakes". And yeah, stuff like Siri that works mostly on servers, you don't need a phone with "AI capabilities" for that, just internet access, but they are certainly going to put in in their ads.

aiono2• 2 years ago

For that "AI" this level of investment was not necessary though. What I mean is about companies that develops LLMs for general problem solving. They require huge investment yet their value yield is still very low.

AdamN• 2 years ago

AI is a means to an end - it's the end that people want (or don't want). For example people like fast and accurate spell check - they don't care whether AI did it or not.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

Of course, they are gimmicks to attempt to sell new phones, now that the market has stagnated, many folks even have two or more phones, and hardly need fancy features.

brailsafe• 2 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer to spend less of my life on my phone in general. Seems like first-party integration of AI features is just a ploy to persuade me to use it more, since the appeal of novel apps or software features has long since died out.

racl101• 2 years ago

I could not care less about AI on my phone. I don't want to learn to use it nor do I want to give it free reign over my content. If I can disable it on any smartphone I own I will.

Of course, aside from checking email and calendar I don't do a lot of work from my phone.

varispeed• 2 years ago

Every time a company shoves AI into their product I see the won't eat cereal meme.

6gvONxR4sf7o• 2 years ago

The only AI thing that excites me on my phone is a battery-friendly way for app developers to run ML models. I don't want an AI assistant that sees everything that i do, but some things like computer vision and translation and OCR are handy to have a super efficient coprocessor for, and I could see interesting apps using ML increasingly. But that's kind of a second order thing. I'm sure apple and them are also trying to figure out how to also let app devs use their strongest foundation models too without every app wanting to download 100GB of weights.

Closi• 2 years ago

It's because current AI is meh on a phone.

Once someone manages to combine Siri's phone integration + ChatGPT Voice mode and it runs locally I will be very interested. Until then, I'm a bit meh on it.

rsynnott4• 2 years ago

Today in incredibly obvious things...

Smartphones are an absolute graveyard of fads; remember the 3D screen phones, the phones with projectors, and so forth? They generally go nowhere. I suspect 'AI' on phones will be similar.

Overwhelmingly, what people want out of phones is "like my current phone, but with better battery life and maybe a better camera." Previously 'faster' was also a concern, but modern phones are largely Good Enough.

changing19993• 2 years ago

Even camera improvements are overblown. My usage and photo quality did not improve much since ~iPhone 6. Taking decent travel photos, selfies, etc - I was happy with the results 10 years ago.

Technically, I understand the difference in the technology, I just don't know who needs that vs who gets excited about new features for a brief moment.

jsbisviewtiful• 2 years ago

Even camera improvements are overblown.

I would love to take a photo using my smartphone that doesn't look pixelated, blurry and or over-processed. Maybe asking too much considering smartphone sensors can't compete with DSLRs in some situations, but I'm always baffled with how dark and desaturated some of my photos turn out on my smartphone, as well.

eleveriven3• 2 years ago

These days, manufacturers seem to focus on more niche improvements (like for mobile gamers)

rsynnott4• 2 years ago

I think some people do genuinely care about the camera improvements; personally anything I’ve used from the iPhone 7 on has been _fine_, but I’m not a demanding camera-user.

x0x03• 2 years ago

I would kinda like search that works over my thousands of photos

243423443• 2 years ago

Google Photos has that. But I guess you mean locally?

ip26• 2 years ago

There's a lot we quietly take for granted. Supposedly the NPUs on phones were originally added to let the phone identify objects in your photo library. When shopping for phones, I tend to shop for better battery and camera... but I also wouldn't go back to a photo library without identification.

rsynnott4• 2 years ago

Yeah, I should possibly qualify; by ‘AI’ on phones I would expect that the average person polled understands LLMs, image generation, that sort of thing. OCR, image classification, etc, I doubt they’re thinking of that when answering this; that wouldn’t even have been marketed as ‘AI’ until a couple years ago.

eleveriven3• 2 years ago

They’ve all been hyped, only to be forgotten as consumers consistently revert to what they actually care about

chihuahua• 2 years ago

My favorite one (in the sense of "most useless") is Amazon's Fire Phone, which had multiple cameras so it could figure out where your face is relative to the screen, which would enable some crazy 3D effect.

octacat• 2 years ago

make 5 days battery life - would be real life changing innovations. AI? meeaah? what for? We already have AI for filters like for ages :)

itronitron• 2 years ago

If AI makes some 'thing' look easy, then that 'thing' starts to look cheap.

alexashka• 2 years ago

There's a fundamental tension between what customers want and what providers want.

Providers want to drip feed and charge for 'improvements' indefinitely.

AI is the next drip feed.

hydrogen7800• 2 years ago

With all the AI marketing for new phones, I keep yelling to myself "Nobody is asking for this!!" But maybe I'm in a minority group of what I consider "nobody".

mbowcut2• 2 years ago

Making things easier to google is IMO the least-impressive use of LLMs. I'm still waiting for a Roomba I can have a conversation with.

notpushkin• 2 years ago

Headsup: CNET is one of those sites playing videos (maybe relevant, maybe not) even on mobile. Be prepared to kill it if you're on metered plan (uBlock Origin can do that on Firefox for Android).

arnaudsm• 2 years ago

I calculated and found almost no correlation (r=0.2) between battery life and price. Which is quite sad considering it's the most important feature to consumers.

Here's my write-up alongside some interesting dataviz : https://picked.arnaud.at/news/smartphone-data-science

FriedPickles• 2 years ago

Horse buyers meh on cars, care more about faster horses

Someone• 2 years ago

Do buyers even know what features are there because of “AI”?

For example, on iOS, you can copy text out of photos (https://support.apple.com/en-ph/120004), you can search for photos without entering key words (not that well yet, in my experience, but the results are better than no results), predictive typing apparently uses a language model, modern camera apps do zillions of things to make photos look better, etc.

Neither of those are killer apps, but each does make the device a little bit better.

tstrimple• 2 years ago

The AI integration I'm looking for isn't to make chatgpt like queries or generate images or find one of my pictures, but to control my damn phone at a much more granular level. Settings are often getting removed or hidden or moved around to the point where controlling your device is a nightmare. Some examples of deeper configuration I'd love to see available:

  - "Hey siri, stop interrupting my audiobooks and music with Teams notifications." 

  - "Could you please tone down the number of audio GPS alerts you send me? I don't need to be told five times before an exit that my exit is coming up. You're interrupting my audiobook too much."

  - "Why are you interrupting my audiobook again?"

  - "I don't know why soundless gifs keep stopping my audiobook, will you cut that shit out?"

  - "Please let me use this audiobook app concurrently with this other app which has all sounds muted"

sidewndr46• 2 years ago

This can't be right. I've been hearing about how great AI is for the past year now. It couldn't be that media outlets just report on whatever they think will generate the most revenue.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

AI is a technology, not a product feature. I don't care about the underlying technology in my products, I care what they do for me. As long as the feature is great, I don't care if it's made with traditional algorithms, AI, or literal magic--it doesn't matter!

This idea that customers want AI is like saying that customers want applications written in Python. Why would they care what's behind the curtain?

notatoad2• 2 years ago

The phone manufacturers have to know this, right? they've got market surveys and focus groups and internal dogfooding programs. they all know that a half-baked chatbot experience is going to sell zero phones.

All this AI marketing push has got to be because they think investors are stupid, and they can fool the market into thinking they're doing an AI.

eleveriven3• 2 years ago

We’re in an era of "subscription fatigue" and smartphone makers adding another monthly fee could be a tough sell

wruza3• 2 years ago

Everyone sees through a stupid lifestyle theater instantly.

Life isn’t just driving around taking filtered selfies and finding friends faces in albums.

If phones didn’t suck, advanced functions would already be there without “ai”. But they lack any sensible integrations beyond the marketed scenes where clueless people are playing particular job, live and hobby moments.

astrodude• 2 years ago

This makes sense, AI is a new phenomena and most people aren't using it on their phones as much as they use SM apps, camera. Battery life is one of the major reasons why people upgrade their phone (believe it or not, many don't just replace their battery)

unsignedint• 2 years ago

I’m all for AI—if it actually does something useful. But features like swiping to remove unwanted items or ensuring everyone smiles in a photo don’t count. For anything genuinely useful, I’d rather subscribe to an AI service separately than pay a premium to have it locked to my phone. I want access from my PC too.

EasyMark• 2 years ago

“Turn off the local AI and let me have that extra power” . I think that’s what most people think. I certainly use AI for some tasks, but I don’t need AI everywhere 24/7 in my pocket.

yungporko• 2 years ago

i think the vast majority of all people are meh on AI. i've only ever seen programmers (and grifters of course) get excited about it.

kartoshechka• 2 years ago

the most useful ML feature for me is text recognition on photos, helps to copy phone numbers and such

Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

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