With all the AI marketing for new phones, I keep yelling to myself "Nobody is asking for this!!" But maybe I'm in a minority group of what I consider "nobody".
Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
191–200 of 343 posts
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#192I 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
I don't want a dumb phone. I want a smartphone without AI crap.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are there examples of new tools based on recent AI advancements that perform better than Google Photos image recognition?
Or better than Picasa almost 10 years ago.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to…
Even if everything worked you should not be trying to do that while driving. Keep your attention on the road - you are in control of several tons of metal moving at deadly speeds. (don't sing a long with the radio either)
I'm unsure of your point. Are you arguing that issuing a verbal command to my voice assistant is not paying attention to the road? No more than talking to a passenger, really.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#195Earlier 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)
Are you sure they bought different flavours because of the screen size or because of naming marketing "pro is better than regular" and "mini obviously has to be worse"?
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#196Making things easier to google is IMO the least-impressive use of LLMs. I'm still waiting for a Roomba I can have a conversation with.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to…
FWIW you were not forced to distract yourself from the road - officially, you should have got off the freeway at the next exit and parked before sorting stuff out.
I mean, sure. Or this could just work how it's marketed to work. Thanks for the helpful reminder!
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#198Headsup: CNET is one of those sites playing videos (maybe relevant, maybe not) even on mobile. Be prepared to kill it if you're on metered plan (uBlock Origin can do that on Firefox for Android).
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#199I 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.
> If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming
Imagine an AI that popped up when you are reading something and warned you that information is false.
For instance, imagine something like https://theconversation.com/can-ai-talk-us-out-of-conspiracy... helping people discern about news and propaganda.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#200Earlier 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...
Do try it. I've been running it ever since it got integrated into the core, mostly to control A/C units around our flat, and it's the best voice assistant experience I had to date.
I mean honestly, how is it possible Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft[0] all keep screwing this up for over a decade now? I literally spent 15 minutes hooking up GPT-4 to the Home Assistant integration, and I was able to semi-reliably[1] control actual devices[2] like air conditioners and smart lights, in a completely natural and ad-hoc way, by talking to my smartwatch on the go, or to a phone, whatever was more convenient at the moment.
It's a really magical experience, a step closer to Star Trek reality. And what makes it possible is not just LLMs being able to deal with natural language, but more importantly, "bring your own API key" model allowing to cut away all the bullshit that FAANG assistants are stuck in.
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[0] - Ever since they dropped MS Speech API in Windows, and did the Cortana thing. Some 15 years passed, at this point, and I'd still prefer to work with the Speech API than to touch any of the FAANGs' voice assistant - it worked, and worked off-line!
[1] - Works ~90% of the time; some 5% of the time the voice model (from Home Assistant Cloud) misunderstands me, and 5% of the time the LLM gets confused. It's still worth it, because I can actually talk to it like to a person, without thinking of style or grammar or magic keywords.
[2] - Which, given the level of integration of Home Assistant companion app with the phone, can be easily turned into an equivalent of on-phone voice assistant that can do more than the one I got from Google. Critically, there are ways to couple Home Assistant app and Tasker, so it's not hard to make it do arbitrary things on your phone. And, if you don't like low-ish code Tasker experience, you can trivially shell out from Tasker to Termux, at which point sky is the limit. Point being, an enthusiastic non-developer with minimal tech aptitude can beat Google and Apple at the voice assistant game today.