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.
Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
121–130 of 343 posts
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's agentic behaviour, and the first to offer it publicly are anthropic, who just opened a beta. It's still pretty terrible though
I love how the goal post is being moved publicly as to what AI means. AI is anything automated it seems, and now they’re being subcategorized into niches as to what they do, e.g. “Agentic AI”, “LLM backed AI systems” etc. If it’s not real intelligence then it isn’t really AI, and I wish the world at large would call it out. LLM, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc are all great but none of them have true spontaneou…
> it’s not real intelligence
Hence the predicated “artificial”, and hence the downvotes you are currently receiving.
Your message is largely, if not entirely, a strawman.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Changing to Gemini broke all of my smart home commands. Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.
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...
I have it set up with ollama. It’s… interesting. HA commands are provided to the model as tools so it works as well as the model is able to determine when and how to use tools. From experimenting with that and my own tool use code I’ve found that models vary greatly in their ability to wield tools and none that I’ve tried are exceptional.
It’s neat that you can intermix general chatting with HA commands but you’re probably going to find that the old assist is more reliable for commands. What I do like is that you can use a template as your system prompt so you can provide the state of a number of entities and then ask for them with natural language. That works well.
I have an Alexa/Echo voice announcement system set up and have recently tied that into assist so I can do automations like if the garage opens I prompt for “what is the state of the garage?” and announce the result. Makes it feel more humane than the same plain announcements all the time.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#124what'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!"
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.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#125These 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?
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
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.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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&id…
iphone minis weren't particularly borked, and they didn't sell well enough, people apparently preferred the larger iphones (to my own dismay)
I'm using an iPhone 12 mini, and it's bigger than I'd ideally like.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#127I 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.
> 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.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#128I 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.
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.
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.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#129Maybe 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.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#130I 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.