I’ve spent the past year covering every major phone launch in the US, and each one loudly declared the same thing: AI is here, and ours is the AI phone you’ve been waiting for. Each was followed by much applause and favorable stock price movement. But when I got those phones into my hands, the AI was underwhelming, to say the least.
The theory is that smartphones as we know them are evolving into something new: AI smartphones. An AI smartphone will be a new kind of device that doesn’t force you to interact with a grid of apps all day long; you’ll be able to ask it to order pizza or send an email just by using an AI-imbued voice assistant. You’ll be able to point your camera at a flyer for a show, have the AI check whether you’re free, and add it to your calendar. You’ll ask it about something a friend said to you — maybe in an email or a text, you’re not sure which — and it will go find the information for you.
Personally, all of the above sounds great to me. I’d love some help with the chores I carry out a hundred times a day on my phone — and with the firehose of incoming information and notifications I deal with. But AI smartphones are not here yet, not by a long shot, despite what you may have heard. Instead, what we have feels like a collection of loosely associated tech demos.
Right now, AI on your phone can help you write and rewrite an email to sound more professional or react to a text with a disco pigeon emoji. There’s AI to translate phone calls, which kind of works and is actually pretty neat. And there’s AI that can turn a nice picture of food into something horrifying. AI on our phones has offered one weird trick after another: sometimes funny, sometimes interesting, but hardly the platform shift we’ve been promised.
The (supposedly) AI smartphones of 2024
All of the major phone makers are at fault. Samsung opened the year with its Galaxy S24 launch in January, declaring “Galaxy AI is here” at a hockey arena-appropriate volume. To be sure, the devices it announced are good smartphones, and they run a blend of Samsung and Google’s Gemini Nano models on-device, but I wouldn’t call them AI smartphones.
Supposedly, they can help you take distractions out of your photos — but you might end up with something even more distracting instead. The live language interpreter feature for phone calls could come in handy for something like making a dinner reservation. But it also translated a statement from my colleague as “I am eating my chair.” (She was not.) Most users will find that these AI features fade into the background once the novelty wears off.
Later in 2024, fall hardware season arrived early with AI-ified Pixels. Google has made much of AI on its phones for the past couple of years, but the company’s Gemini AI is absolutely everywhere on the Pixel 9 series. There’s an AI-generated summary at the top of the weather app, a new app that saves and tags your screenshots using AI, a new AI-powered default assistant, and lots of AI image generation tools — from silly to seriously worrying.
Some of it does feel useful, particularly the screenshots app, which is the kind of thing you might find handy if you tend to keep infinite Chrome tabs open on your phone as bookmarks. But these features, siloed into their respective apps, don’t feel like they have much to do with each other. Gemini sort of connects the dots with extensions, but support for different apps is being added slowly — and even with an extension, Gemini can only do so much for you.
Last but not least, we met the iPhones “built for Apple Intelligence” in September. I think it says a lot about the state of Apple’s AI that the iPhone 16 initially shipped without Apple Intelligence. AI features finally arrived in late October with iOS 18.1. And if anyone was waiting with bated breath, this first update was probably underwhelming.
Right now, Apple Intelligence includes summaries for notifications and emails, tools to alter the style of your writing, and a new glowing UI for Siri. Notification summaries can be useful, but usually they’re just funny. The writing tools are standard fare at this point, and Siri is basically the same old assistant with a new coat of paint. There’s more to come, but what’s here now certainly doesn’t add up to an AI smartphone.
A messy year for AI
It’s not just phones; this is a messy moment for AI in general. Depending on who you ask, AI is either a massive bubble that’s about to burst or a few months away from evolving into digital God. AI is being foisted on us in every direction: surfacing in Google search results, lurking in every Meta product, greeting you by name in the Spotify app. It’s hard to separate the signal from the noise when it comes to AI, because the noise is everywhere and it’s so goddamn loud!
And there really might be a signal in there — especially when it comes to our phones. Siri really might become more useful, with an Apple Intelligence update this spring that will allow it to take action in apps through something known as App Intents. Developers will be able to surface certain actions — like ordering the pizza that AI proponents keep promising — so they’re accessible at the system level by Siri. Google seems to be preparing a similar framework in Android 16, which could help bridge the gap between Gemini and individual apps without the apps needing an entire extension. And who knows? Maybe Bixby will get in the game, too.
The trouble is, after a full year of supposedly game-changing AI on our mobile devices that amounted to nothing, it’s starting to sound like the phone makers are crying wolf. The real AI smartphones need to stand up pretty soon — before our collective patience starts to run out.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
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