AI Promised to Revolutionize Cell Phones, But I Haven't Seen Anything Revolutionary Yet

AI, AI, and more AI. The future of smartphones is AI. It was the focus of the Google Pixel 8 Pro presentation, the main argument for the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and the big bet at the Apple event where the company presented its Apple Intelligence.

I’ve been using AI phones for quite some time. I have the Google Pixel 8 Pro, the new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, and the OPPO Reno12 Pro, some of the top references in the field.

Although a loyal AI supporter, I’ve faced constant challenges with each phone. I haven’t found any real-world usage scenarios where it was necessary or convenient for me to use AI. And I’m absolutely convinced that neither has the everyday user.

A photo-oriented AI. Currently, photo editing is one of the critical points of AI. Resizing photo elements, changing the sky, deleting elements... I’m a professional photographer and videographer, so you would think these AI features would help people like me. The truth is, no, they don't. Just the opposite.

Far from features like intelligent noise reduction or automatic mask selection in Lightroom (PC), generative enlargement in Photoshop (also on PC), etc., AI for smartphones is limited to removing elements from photos. The other significant point of its generative editing is to take two or three of our images and create Midjourney-style drawings.

Except for the ability to remove someone from a photo, the rest is the perfect definition of features that you use once with friends for a laugh, only for them to end up buried and forgotten.

Professional use. Another function of AI is creating resumes and transcribing interviews. As a journalist, the transcribing feature is useful for me. But as an analyst, I can’t help but think about the general public, not myself. How many readers will ever use audio-to-text transcription? I’m sure that only a few will.

AI can also summarize articles, which isn’t really valuable for me in these times of fast information and 300/400-word articles. And at the time I was drafting this article, developers restricted these article summarization features to their browsers.

I’ve also never experienced a situation where I had to change the style of an already written text to one that's more conversational, professional, for social media. However, I do believe in AI as an excellent tool for writing emails.

The funny thing is that Google Chrome doesn’t integrate the resumes created by Google Gemini.

My feeling is constantly the same: My phone can do many things I don’t usually need it to do, even when I do the tasks it’s supposed to help me with. I appreciate these options and would rather have them than not have them. Still, AI on smartphones is quite different from the help I get from GPT and Photoshop AI on my computer.

What’s different about Apple’s AI? Apple Intelligence is more of the same but with a significant difference. The system will be able to understand what’s happening in all apps. For example, it will know that we have a message in the Mail app with a ticket to a concert, allowing it to put the date in Calendar and the event address on Maps.

Asking Siri to “send Paul the address of the last concert via WhatsApp” is at least an interesting concept. But right now, it doesn’t exist.

This article was written by Ricardo Aguilar and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.

Image | Xataka On

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