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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

#211

Post by reaperducer »

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…

All of that sounds like the boring low-hanging life fruit that gets trotted out in videos by companies like Apple and Google as being "revolutionary." It's boring. It's staged. It's the easy stuff. It's well-off 20-somethings solving non-problems for other well-off 20-somethings.

Wake me up when I can say things like…

Hey, Google, are my custom license plates ready for pick up at the tax office?

Hey, Siri, ask my doctor to refill this medicine.

Hey, Alexa, how many charging stations are broken at the gas station on 16th street?

Hey, Google, why is this plant dying?

Hey, Siri, why are there so many people in my neighborhood today?

Hey, Alexa, did anything ever get done about that story in the newspaper from a couple of years ago about the Chinese slave labor being used to grow pot on illegal farms on the Navajo reservation?

"AI" just doesn't have access to the information required to do anything interesting or useful. And because so much of its information comes from the web, which is already so polluted on certain subject (gardening, travel) as to be useless, the AI becomes useless.

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

#212

Post by lancesells »

lolinder wrote: post #107
candiddevmike wrote: post #59

Earlier 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 heard horror stories and have held off so far in 'upgrading'. In the end I don't really want the fully flexible responses people are leaning into with these llm tools. All I want is to be able to give a precise instruction with my voice and have the machine reliably perform the action that it performed the last time I gave that instruction. Since that seems to be an increasingly niche desire (at least as far as…

Yeah, I would like Siri to actually play the album I asked for and not something completely different phonetically from what I asked. Or even when I set an alarm and not be told "I can't connect to the internet right now" while I'm using my laptop connected to the internet. Or if my internet is down to actually use the speakers that I bought as speakers.

The hardware is really well done but the software is either over or under-engineered to a stupid degree.

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

#213

Post by Someone »

Do buyers even know what features are there because of “AI”?

For example, on iOS, you can copy text out of photos (https://support.apple.com/en-ph/120004), you can search for photos without entering key words (not that well yet, in my experience, but the results are better than no results), predictive typing apparently uses a language model, modern camera apps do zillions of things to make photos look better, etc.

Neither of those are killer apps, but each does make the device a little bit better.

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

#214

Post by tstrimple »

The AI integration I'm looking for isn't to make chatgpt like queries or generate images or find one of my pictures, but to control my damn phone at a much more granular level. Settings are often getting removed or hidden or moved around to the point where controlling your device is a nightmare. Some examples of deeper configuration I'd love to see available:

  - "Hey siri, stop interrupting my audiobooks and music with Teams notifications." 

  - "Could you please tone down the number of audio GPS alerts you send me? I don't need to be told five times before an exit that my exit is coming up. You're interrupting my audiobook too much."

  - "Why are you interrupting my audiobook again?"

  - "I don't know why soundless gifs keep stopping my audiobook, will you cut that shit out?"

  - "Please let me use this audiobook app concurrently with this other app which has all sounds muted"

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

#215

Post by changing1999 »

jsbisviewtiful wrote: post #201
changing1999 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even camera improvements are overblown. My usage and photo quality did not improve much since ~iPhone 6. Taking decent travel photos, selfies, etc - I was happy with the results 10 years ago. Technically, I understand the difference in the technology, I just don't know who needs that vs who gets excited about new features for a brief moment.

> Even camera improvements are overblown. I would love to take a photo using my smartphone that doesn't look pixelated, blurry and or over-processed. Maybe asking too much considering smartphone sensors can't compete with DSLRs in some situations, but I'm always baffled with how dark and desaturated some of my photos turn out on my smartphone, as well.

Me too! If anything, iPhone photos became more over-processed over the last decade.

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

#217

Post by x0x0 »

rsynnott wrote: post #162

Today in incredibly obvious things... Smartphones are an absolute graveyard of fads; remember the 3D screen phones, the phones with projectors, and so forth? They generally go nowhere. I suspect 'AI' on phones will be similar. Overwhelmingly, what people want out of phones is "like my current phone, but with better battery life and maybe a better camera." Previously 'faster' was also a concern, but modern phones are…

I would kinda like search that works over my thousands of photos

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

#218

Post by acdha »

rbanffy wrote: post #199
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.

> 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.

That’d be useful but I’m pretty sure they’d get a massive backlash on Fox News and lawsuits filed alleging “being cancelled” within minutes of that shipping. It’s something we need but our current disinformation problem isn’t an accident but the result of decades of investment.

The less fraught one is warning users that they’re being scammed: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-wants-ai-to-l...

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

#219

Post by gumby271 »

conradev wrote: post #188
radlad wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there examples of new tools based on recent AI advancements that perform better than Google Photos image recognition?

Google highlighted the delta that recent advancements brought to their products: https://blog.google/products/photos/ask-photos-google-io-202...

Wow they announced this back in May and it's still not available for me.

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

#220

Post by bradyd »

rbanffy wrote: post #199
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.

> 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.

Why would you trust AI, something that regularly makes stuff up, to be able to accurately determine that?
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