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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

#151

Post by swatcoder »

itsoktocry wrote: post #145
swatcoder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exc…

> 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. Hasn't Google been doing this forever? I can search random things in my photos (like pictures of an old car I owned).

For a bit, and to a degree, yes. Last-decade image recognition and tagging teased what might be possible and is genuinely useful.

The new LLM-ish tools promise that users can be more vague and casual in what language they use and more elaborate in how specific they mean to be; and that the queries (and operations) can span more diverse data sources.

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

#153

Post by dragonwriter »

paul7986 wrote: post #150
kredd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search Some personal examples of how I find it more useful (love to hear yours) and fun to use.... - Wanted to go on a hike an hour away from where both my friend (lives two hours west of me) and I live. Asked GPT what are some good hikes an hour dri…

> Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search

I can't speak to your personal entertainment experience, but AI chatbots are generally a slower, less accurate way of getting information than a google search. (Though Google polluting search results with a big, often inaccurate, AI result at the top narrows this a bit.)

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

#154

Post by bluGill »

no_wizard wrote: post #116
michaelt wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compe…

Important CEOs bring their trusted human assistant with them. Those of us at a lower level don't get that option, but at the CEO level you get to hire your own sectary and you spend years teaching them how you work and what to do in all the situations that come up and so they will make the right decisions often enough that you can trust them. Or they know they are not trusted to reschedule that appointment and so they don't.

That years of training is what we are missing. I don't think modern AIs can be trained in the way the assistants of old could be, at least not yet.

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

#155

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

candiddevmike wrote: post #59
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.

Changing to Gemini broke all of my smart home commands. Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.

> Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.

Teach a man to fish!

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

#156

Post by fao_ »

okasaki wrote: post #149
swatcoder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exc…

It's great for spooks too. Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.

I'm not sure that a hallucinated image of something is better than the original image when you're doing spywork.

The difference between whether someone has 4 or 5 fingers, whether they're holding a gun versus a random object, or whether they're mixed-race or caucasian, all seem like they would be pretty important things. Likewise, car number plates, signage in the photo that help identify where it is, metadata of the image itself (often more useful than the image), are all incredibly important. All of those are things that AI is absolutely terrible at lmao.

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

#157

Post by bluGill »

Perz1val wrote: post #88
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 I were a somebody worth a personal assistant/secretary, I'd be pissed about them doing such things without notice too

If you had such a person they would know if you wanted that service of not and act accordingly.

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

#158

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #56
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.

Right but in street surveys nobody knows that. Most people just call it "better camera."

... then one day the tentacles come out ... https://i.redd.it/j1cr7pr6m7j71.jpg

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

#159

Post by HumblyTossed »

dageshi wrote: post #34
brianshaler wrote: post #5

I'd rather have flagship specs in a smaller package. The smallest in the iPhone (SE) and Pixel ("A"?) lines are still too big and tend to have previous-gen specs

I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.

> I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.

The iPhone mini was a billion dollar device. Anyone other than Apple would have called that a success.

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

#160

Post by grahamj »

lolinder wrote: post #79
jonplackett wrote: post #40

These 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?

The poll is very weirdly constructed. It looks like they gave people a set of checkboxes to check rather than asking people to rank their opinions on a scale. 25% checked the box saying they don't find AI tools helpful, but only 14% said they do. Which means 61% checked neither box. 45% are reluctant to pay, but only 6% said they were willing to. So again, 49% simply didn't say one way or the other. 12% straight-up d…

> 25% checked the box saying they don't find AI tools helpful, but only 14% said they do. Which means 61% checked neither box.

But why include people who didn’t pick anything? Surely they should be ignored and it ends up being 64/36.

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