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Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

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Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#111

Post by not_your_vase »

zomg wrote: post #20

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!"

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...

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#113

Post by swatcoder »

mondobe wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#114

Post by ffsm8 »

mondobe wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#115

Post by goblinux »

hkon wrote: post #83
agentultra wrote: post #78

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.

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

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

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#116

Post by no_wizard »

michaelt wrote: post #99
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maj…

If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late? Seems to me the problems are (1) the "assistants" aren't anywhere near good enough to be trusted to make the right decisions, and (2) a trustworthy assistant isn't compatible with the adtech business model, so it's unlikely facebook or google woul…

>If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late?

Yes, why wouldn’t I? I could also give them parameters like “if I’m more than 20 minutes late please re-schedule this” or “if my flight is delayed please let everyone know it’s delayed”

Why wouldn’t I do that? Presumably the person hired is competent to make determinations within parameters specified.

I could also let them know when it’s inappropriate to do this. Again, they should be competent enough to discern the differences between when it is and isn’t appropriate.

This could honestly be done by an algorithm if you give it the correct inputs and outputs and it could be fed updates, the only real limit is the fact that some of this isn’t exposed via an API either in a timely fashion or at all

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#118

Post by mvdtnz »

kredd wrote: post #37
mondobe wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#119

Post by wlesieutre »

artwr wrote: post #54
est31 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That’s the line of thinking behind Halide’s recent “process zero” feature on iOS

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220178/halide-camera-ap...

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#120

Post by techbrovanguard »

brtkdotse wrote: post #2

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

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.

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