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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

#231
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.

I can't imagine that working, even if that AI were more reliable than currently possible. Someone who already disbelieves credible reporting and objective sources is not going to be swayed by an AI telling them to disregard their fantastical conspiracy theories. Especially not in a near-future world where everyone is inundated with AI fakery.

That's even without considering the efforts that would be made to undermine any system that showed any effectiveness. A lot of misinformation, probably most of the stuff that gets traction, isn't random, it's serving a purpose and being pushed for that reason.

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

#232

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…

You could have just given it a time and canceled it later when it was safe to. No need to endanger others on the road for this.

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

#233
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I trust a defective AI a lot more than I trust Fox News ;-)

Now, more seriously, it'd need to put together a coherent argument and back it up with reputable sources, as just citing sources is very ineffective. The article I cited gives more details on possible approaches to that.

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

#234
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Photos has that. But I guess you mean locally?

Google photos search doesn't work well at all for me. Even things like "[my dog name] beach" isn't reliable. Or things like I use photos as notes. It doesn't reliably recall things like cheese when I take pictures of cheese in various stores to remember what is sold where. Not even the name of the cheese; just cheese. Ditto spices.

Don't use the name - "Mr Floppy at the beach" is meaningless, but "dog at a beach" will probably yield a lot more.

I've found google photos search to be pretty good, and if it can't find something usually the map-mode is enough to pin it down (e.g. go to the beach where you took the photo and it shows you the photos from there)

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

#235
post #232

Earlier 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…

You could have just given it a time and canceled it later when it was safe to. No need to endanger others on the road for this.

Had I not been flustered and in insane traffic I probably would have been able to figure this out on the spot quickly enough. I did eventually try this after a few minutes and it still wasn’t working. Alternatively, the product could just work how it’s advertised.

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

#236
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that changed for me was a that it couldn't control my smart Home devices anymore, nor activate navigation, nor send messages via Whatsapp (I.e. while driving). Literally every thing I used it for got answered via "I cannot do that yet" after it randomly opted me into that. Pure garbage.

Then why are you using it? I tried using Gemini once on my Pixel 6. Couldn't play music on Youtube music on verbal instructions, I switched back to Google Assistant. Will try it again after 6 months now. :)

> Then why are you using it?

I'm not, I pretty much just accepted that Google doesn't care about usability whatsoever and haven't prompted it in a very long time.

To be clear, the only time I've ever used it was via "ok Google" in contexts in which I'm unable to interface with the phone directly, i.e while driving. If it doesn't work you'll learn that you can't start driving before queueing the navigation anymore. The voice assistant was a nice feature, but not important enough to waste my time trying to figure out which feature they opted me into and how to get back out of it.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interpretation of this on its nose suggest the algorithms are the core feature not AI, as there is no artificial intelligence involved in these processes that I’m aware of. If you actually peak under the hood they just pass through weighted selectors, no different than a switch statement

what about the infamous recognizing the moon in the background that is just an over exposed white fuzzy circle and replacing with a stock image with full surface details? clearly there's some sort of ML/recognition of content within the image

Yes that would be ML as far as I’m aware, but the thing in reference is software compensation for image quality. Effectively smartphones automatically upscale photos by default. I think the only exception is when you choose to shoot in raw

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m often surprised that my iPhone photo app show old photos in the widget that look stunning and were taken with the iPhone XS and 11 PM. Night photos are better now but day photos stalled a long time ago. I find joy taking some shots with halide or photon in trueRaw where all processing is removed and grain is present. It gives an authentic look … so all HDR stuff is often too much

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

#239
The phone manufacturers have to know this, right? they've got market surveys and focus groups and internal dogfooding programs. they all know that a half-baked chatbot experience is going to sell zero phones.

All this AI marketing push has got to be because they think investors are stupid, and they can fool the market into thinking they're doing an AI.

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

#240
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s one of the big problems with these dominant trillion dollar corporations. For them it’s not worth to pursue something as small as a billion dollar market but they still have enough market power to suppress any competitor who wants to deliver such a product. That’s why we are seeing less and less innovation and diversity compared to the 1980s to around 2000
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