The AI Smartphones

A Messy Year for AI

I’ve spent the past year covering every major phone launch in the US, and each one loudly declared the same thing: AI is here, and it’s the AI phone you’ve been waiting for. Each was followed by much applause and favorable stock price movement. But when I got those phones into my hands, the AI was underwhelming, to say the least.

The Theory

The theory is that smartphones as we know them are evolving into something new: AI smartphones. An AI smartphone will be a new kind of device that doesn’t force you to interact with a grid of apps all day long; you’ll be able to ask it to order pizza or send an email just by using an AI-imbued voice assistant. You’ll be able to point your camera at a flyer for a show, have the AI check whether you’re free, and add it to your calendar. You’ll ask it about something a friend said to you — maybe in an email or a text, you’re not sure which — and it will go find the information for you.

Google’s Gemini Assistant

Google’s Gemini assistant has steadily improved since launch but still falls short of a true AI assistant.

My Expectations

Personally, all of the above sounds great to me. I’d love some help with the chores I carry out a hundred times a day on my phone — and with the firehose of incoming information and notifications I deal with. But AI smartphones are not here yet, not by a long shot, despite what you may have heard. Instead, what we have feels like a collection of loosely associated tech demos.

The State of AI on Our Phones

Right now, AI on our phones can help you write and rewrite an email to sound more professional or react to a text with a disco pigeon emoji. There’s AI to translate phone calls, which kind of works and is actually pretty neat. And there’s AI that can turn a nice picture of food into something horrifying. AI on our phones has offered one weird trick after another: sometimes funny, sometimes interesting, but hardly the platform shift we’ve been promised.

The (Supposedly) AI Smartphones of 2024

All of the major phone makers are at fault. Samsung opened the year with its Galaxy S24 launch in January, declaring "Galaxy AI is here" at a hockey arena-appropriate volume. To be sure, the devices it announced are good smartphones, and they run a blend of Samsung and Google’s Gemini Nano models on-device, but I wouldn’t call them AI smartphones.

**Supposedly, they can help you take distractions out of your photos — but you might end up with something even more distracting instead. The live language interpreter feature for phone calls could come in handy for something like making a dinner reservation. But it also translated a statement from my colleague as "I am eating my chair." (She was not.) Most users will find that these AI features fade into the background once the novelty wears off.

Later in 2024, fall hardware season arrived early with AI-ified Pixels. Google has made much of AI on its phones for the past couple of years, but the company’s Gemini AI is absolutely everywhere on the Pixel 9 series. There’s an AI-generated summary at the top of the weather app, a new app that saves and tags your screenshots using AI, a new AI-powered default assistant, and lots of AI image generation tools — from silly to seriously worrying.

Some of it does feel useful, particularly the screenshots app, which is the kind of thing you might find handy if you tend to keep infinite Chrome tabs open on your phone as bookmarks. But these features, siloed into their respective apps, don’t feel like they have much to do with each other. Gemini sort of connects the dots with extensions, but support for different apps is being added slowly — and even with an extension, Gemini can only do so much for you.

Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence started shipping a month after the iPhone 16, but its blockbuster features won’t arrive until 2025.

A Messy Year for AI

It’s not just phones; this is a messy moment for AI in general. Depending on who you ask, AI is either a massive bubble that’s about to burst or a few months away from evolving into digital God. AI is being foisted on us in every direction: surfacing in Google search results, lurking in every Meta product, greeting you by name in the Spotify app. It’s hard to separate the signal from the noise when it comes to AI, because the noise is everywhere and it’s so goddamn loud!

The Real AI Smartphones Need to Stand Up

The trouble is, after a full year of supposedly game-changing AI on our mobile devices that amounted to nothing, it’s starting to sound like the phone makers are crying wolf. The real AI smartphones need to stand up pretty soon — before our collective patience starts to run out.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

FAQs:

Q: What is the current state of AI on our phones?
A: AI on our phones can help with tasks such as writing and rewriting emails, translating phone calls, and generating text, but it is still limited and not yet a full-fledged AI assistant.

Q: What are the major phone makers doing with AI?
A: Samsung, Google, and Apple are all working on AI-powered features, but they are still in the early stages and have yet to deliver on their promises.

Q: When can we expect to see real AI smartphones?
A: It’s hard to say, but it seems like the phone makers are still a few years away from delivering on their promises. In the meantime, we may see more incremental improvements to existing AI features.

Q: What are the limitations of current AI on our phones?
A: Current AI on our phones is limited and can be slow, unreliable, and often requires manual input. It’s also often tied to specific apps and can’t be used across different apps.