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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

#81

Post by no_wizard »

est31 wrote: post #42
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.

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.

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

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

#82

Post by chankstein38 »

zomg wrote: post #20

what's a realistic use case for ai on a mobile phone? i have yet to find myself saying "gee, if only i had ai on my phone, i could do XYZ!"

The only one I use regularly is object replacement in photos. It's great for editing a street sign out of a picture of the sky or something, especially if you just don't want to dox yourself posting a pic. It's definitely not high quality most times. Just blurry redraw of what the background might look like.

Otherwise, totally with you. No idea why my phone needs AI. I can just open the ChatGPT app if I want to have a discussion with ChatGPT about something. I'm so tired of apps updating to "Add a new AI assistant!" like why do I need to talk to an LLM in most of the apps I use?

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

#83

Post by hkon »

agentultra wrote: post #78

I 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

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

#84

Post by vineyardmike »

xvector wrote: post #21
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?

I worked on a (failed) system that was supposed to help with this in the pre-ChatGPT era. The obvious limitations is getting the data, and scaling that to everyone. Learning about your flights, staying up to date on them, etc is such a daunting privacy-busting task that everyone is scared to start. Either you go use-case by use-case (flights, restaurants, calendars… etc) and never get traction or you just start scanning emails and open up huge data risks.

Today, this is nearly available, nearly. Probably only something Google/apple can realistically offer. Apple “intelligence” has started to read your notifications and rewrite them for you, so it shouldn’t be a big leap to listen for a United App notification and decide it’s urgent enough take action. Should be “trivial” for Google to do as well, and they could even run it server side to help without a phone present.

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

#85

Post by no_wizard »

literalAardvark wrote: post #32
xvector wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

That's agentic behaviour, and the first to offer it publicly are anthropic, who just opened a beta. It's still pretty terrible though

I love how the goal post is being moved publicly as to what AI means.

AI is anything automated it seems, and now they’re being subcategorized into niches as to what they do, e.g. “Agentic AI”, “LLM backed AI systems” etc.

If it’s not real intelligence then it isn’t really AI, and I wish the world at large would call it out.

LLM, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc are all great but none of them have true spontaneous intelligence or learning ability.

Please, someone point out how any of these systems have organic spontaneous learning ability for a subject it was not pre-data seeded on. This is a generally accepted measure of higher level sentience as far as I’m aware

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

#86

Post by NoboruWataya »

Syonyk wrote: post #18

> The biggest motivation for US adult smartphone owners to upgrade their devices is longer battery life (61%)... Battery replacements are a thing. They're apparently not a common thing, unfortunately, because that might impact new phone sales... and even on devices where it's trivial, people don't seem to do it. A decade ago or so I was doing a lot of Nexus 5 battery swaps for people because one of the battery OEMs w…

> Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor

Well, people are probably going to put cases on their phone regardless, so the phone has to be thin enough that even with a case it's still a manageable size.

But I agree that battery is where phones ultimately fail most of the time. I have had a Samsung S10 for a bit over 5 years now and it is the battery that is going to force me to retire it and get a new one. Speed, storage, screen quality, camera quality are all perfectly fine for my use case. But the battery rarely lasts a full day with any kind of usage now which is annoying.

I would love a phone with a replaceable battery. But I agree that the average consumer won't bother, they will just get a new one (or they will have upgraded before battery life ever becomes an issue).

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

#87

Post by romwell »

est31 wrote: post #42
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.

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.

>Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty

Nah.

Smartphone cameras stopped being shitty a while ago, long before AI and computational photography hacks.

What you mean to say is they without AI, you'd know sooner that the smartphone maker put a cheap, shitty camera in your "premium" phone.

>People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.

Yeah, it's also fake image generation featuring humans with a funny number of fingers.

What AI isn't is a camera.

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

#88

Post by Perz1val »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #47
xvector wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

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

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

#89

Post by altdataseller »

xvector wrote: post #21
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?

1. How does it know how/when to reschedule that doctor's appointment that you need to call to reschedule? How do you know that receptionist won't hang up on your "AI agent" who tries to call them, b/c they think it's some sort of scam bot?

2. How does it know which contacts to contact? Does that acquaintance you talked to for some professional reason need to know your flight got rescheduled? What about that travel agency you talked to last night to confirm the flight?

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

#90

Post by II2II »

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 article provides insufficent data to answer any of those questions, since "don't know" or "undecided" are frequently options in such surveys.

Yet they do provide sufficient information for the headline. AI integrations came in 7th place for considerations when upgrading a smartphone.

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