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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

#21

Post by xvector »

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.

"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?

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

#22

Post by JohnMakin »

brtkdotse wrote: post #2

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

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 avert my attention from the road, disconnect my phone, then plug it back in and pull my map up again.

She can't do or understand the most astoundingly basic stuff. I guess maybe it "feels" worse now because most LLM's are pretty good at understanding your meaning/intention, but my god, it's so bad that if I were in charge of that product I'd rip it out entirely. There's no way anyone finds any real use out of it.

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

#24

Post by efficax »

tra3 wrote: post #14
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 got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.

there are dozens of us! dozens!!! i’m also keeping my 13 mini until it’s dead

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

#25

Post by mmmore »

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

Unfortunately, people don't buy small phones as much.

https://youtu.be/iR9zBsKELVs?si=3o1qD-4R7lyezZwt

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

#26

Post by xp84 »

mouse_ wrote: post #9

I would pay extra to -not- have AI in my phone. AI belongs on mainframes, out of my way when I don't want it.

This is an underrated take. Apple, especially, wants to leverage their excellent silicon to do “AI” locally in the name of privacy purely as a marketing advantage, but the tradeoffs there are major (burning my battery instead of data center AC power, plus, my phone will never be better or faster than some big metal GPU with fans), and the privacy issue could just as well be solved by doing a good job designing the server side architecture and educating people that unlike when talking to a person, it’s trivial for a model to “not learn anything from” a conversation, and that that’s in fact automatically how it works unless you’re logging the conversations and purposely feeding them back in.

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

#27

Post by jermaustin1 »

brtkdotse wrote: post #2

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

I need better speech to text. I have to repeat my text message 5+ times sometimes when sending it through carplay. I'm not talking about anything long either. A handful of words that my accent just doesn't work with. More than once per day I get fed up enough to pull over and text it.

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

#29

Post by diggan »

tra3 wrote: post #14
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 got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.

> I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini.

I literally was in the Apple store yesterday for the same purpose (with a 12 mini). I'd also love the new features and hardware, but after trying all the available sizes in the store, they're all too big.

My wife on the other hand(s), loves to have a phone she needs to hold with two hands to even be able to use, so obviously she has the Pro Max. I don't understand how people are OK with that, but to each and their own...

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