I’ve covered every major cell phone launch in the United States over the past year, and each time I’ve heard the same thing proclaimed. AI is here and our phone is the AI smartphone you’ve been waiting for. Each received a lot of applause, and stock prices also performed well. But when I got my hands on these smartphones, the AI was overwhelming, to say the least.
The theory is that smartphones as we know them are evolving into something new: AI smartphones. AI smartphones will be a new kind of device that won’t require you to navigate a grid of apps all day long. Just use an AI-powered voice assistant to order a pizza or send an email. Point your camera at a show flyer and the AI will check if it’s available and let you add it to your calendar. If you ask about something your friend told you, perhaps in an email or a text message, you don’t know, and they’ll find out the information for you.
Personally, I think all of the above are great. I would appreciate any help with the chores I use my phone to perform hundreds of times a day, and the fire hose of incoming information and notifications I process. But contrary to what you may have heard, AI smartphones are not yet a reality. Rather, what we have feels more like a collection of loosely related tech demos.
Now, your phone’s AI can help you write or rewrite your emails to sound more professional and respond to texts with a disco pigeon emoji. There’s an AI that translates calls, and it actually works really well. And then there’s the AI that can turn nice photos of food into scary ones. The AI in our phones has been giving us one weird trick after another. While sometimes entertaining and sometimes interesting, there was little of the transition to the platform that we were promised.
(Possibly) AI smartphones in 2024
All major mobile phone manufacturers are to blame. Samsung kicked off the year with the launch of the Galaxy S24 in January, proclaiming “Galaxy AI is here” at a volume worthy of a hockey stadium. Sure, the devices the company announced are good smartphones, with a combination of Samsung and Google’s Gemini Nano models running on the device, but I wouldn’t call them AI smartphones.
It’s supposed to help remove distractions from your photos, but instead it can end up being even more distracting. A live language interpreter feature on your phone might come in handy for things like dinner reservations. But it also translated my colleague’s remark as “eating a chair.” (She wasn’t.) Most users will find that these AI features fade into the background once the novelty wears off.
In late 2024, the fall hardware season has arrived early with AI-enabled pixels. Google has been focusing on AI in its smartphones for the past few years, and the company’s Gemini AI is fully featured across the Pixel 9 series. An AI-generated summary at the top of the weather app, a new app that uses AI to save and tag screenshots, a new AI-powered default assistant, and a new app that takes your worries from silly to serious. There are many AI image generation tools, ranging from .
You might find some of them useful, especially the screenshot app if you tend to keep Chrome tabs open endlessly as bookmarks on your phone. However, these features are siled in their own apps and don’t seem to have much to do with each other. Gemini is like connecting the dots using extensions, but support for different apps is being added over time, and even with extensions, there’s only so much you can do with Gemini.
Last but not least, in September we announced the iPhone “Made for Apple Intelligence.” 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 iOS 18.1 in late October. And if you’ve been waiting with bated breath, this first update was probably underwhelming.
Apple Intelligence now includes notifications and email summaries, tools to change the style of your writing, and a new shiny UI for Siri. Notification summaries can be useful, but they’re usually just for fun. Writing instruments are standard at this point, and Siri is basically the same old assistant with a new coat of paint. There will be more in the future, but what we have here today certainly does not amount to an AI smartphone.
A year of disruption for AI
It’s not just the phone. This is a troubling moment for AI in general. Depending on who you ask, AI is either a giant bubble about to burst or it’s months away from evolving into a digital god. AI is being pushed at us from all directions. They show up in Google search results, lurk in every meta product, and greet you by name in the Spotify app. When it comes to AI, it’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise. Because noise is everywhere and it’s very loud.
There may actually be a signal, especially when it comes to cell phones. This spring’s Apple Intelligence update could make Siri even more useful. This allows Siri to perform actions within your app through what are known as App Intents. Siri allows developers to surface certain actions, such as ordering a pizza, which AI proponents keep promising, making them accessible at a system level. Google seems to be preparing a similar framework for Android 16, which could help bridge the gap between Gemini and individual apps without requiring an entire extension for the app. And who knows? Perhaps Bixby will also be in the game.
The problem is that it’s starting to sound like cell phone manufacturers are whining that a year of introducing supposedly game-changing AI to mobile devices hasn’t helped them. Real AI smartphones need to launch fairly quickly, before our patience reaches its limits.
Photo by Alison Johnson/The Verge
