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With all due respect, I think you're wildly out of touch with how most people use "phones" these days. Actual calls probably represent about 5% of my phone use. The term "phone" is essentially a historical misnomer at this point.

Maybe being in my mid 30's I'm too old to be up to date on this but what do people who aren't "out of touch" use their phones nowadays for? Some form of 'Apps' I'm guessing.

And for those apps to serve their purpose (excepting the likes of Candy Crush and Genshin Impact) what do those apps need? Internet connectivity right? Which is received via the same modem as the calls, right?

So a sucky modem will negatively impact battery life and app usage in challenging environments just as much or even more as call capabilities, right?

Am I close?

Oh you are spot on.

The confusion was probably just about saying it's a phone first. I'm in my mid 30s as well and the only time I call someone is when I contact my mother. I think with the younger generation it's at a point where calling someone is seen as intrusive.

If you are calling me you are taking my choice away on when to deal with whatever you've got. Or at least are interrupting me with the attempt itself. So it better be important.

So on point. And even when it actually phones 90% of the time I just dodge it. That 10% left is pagerduty. All real contacts use some form of a messaging app instead

Can't concur at all

Won't work where I live now in south-centeal Europe (Austria ) where everything is archaic and most services are still done via phone calls like in the past: appointments for plumbers, doctors, recruiter call-backs to job applications, etc.

Almost none of those services here use email or apps as the default, everyone seems to prefer sync communication so they first tries to reach you on phone. If you don't answer or call back they'll assume you're ghosting them and don't need the appointment/service anymore and you'll miss out on important issues. Sometimes they'll leave a voicemail telling you to call them back when you can, so you can never really escape calls here without emigrating.

You can say we both live in completely different bubbles but the existence of one does not invalidate the other.

I'm from Poland. It's just over the course of years most of the services became messenger contacts, for various reasons, but most common one was the need to reliably exchange pictures

And you do need a reliable modem to reliability exchange pictures.

Yeah, and most of the time I do it on wifi. Still, most of the actual voice GSM part of my phones communication is used by salespeople

Sure but when you're out and about and don't have WiFi you'll be relying on your modem to send/receive pictures and all kinds of data.

Probably not an issue if you're all the time in cities with great coverage but you'll feel it when you go in "the woods" or well shielded buildings or basements.

Yeah, in that case you're right.

Love Austria btw., and appreciate the preciseness of your language. It's been years since I worked with it, but it always felt like a vacation for my brain, while consuming technical content in it

>Love Austria btw., and appreciate the preciseness of your language.

I'm not Austrian, I'm an immigrant here, and it's not "my language" nor anyone else's I presume, it's still just German, albeit with an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent on top.

I think people don't speak at their phones simply because the experience is so horrible.

I would LOVE to be able to voice control the various aspects of my phone but it's so mind numbingly frustrating that I'm annoyed just thinking about it. If it was better I would sacrifice other features for it.

Totally agree, the second I have to switch from a normal voice to a stupid voice with the correct nuances for the unit to "work" is usually the last time I use it.

Our google home basically sits there all day waiting for my wife to say "play abba", she has a strong non-English accent and it's about the only thing it seems to pick up. Don't get me on cars where I have to say the exact sentence to do anything.

_They usually use their phones to speak to other people_

Counterpoint – I haven't met many people who use their phones to speak to other people. YMMV.

Could be a generational and culture thing as well, being Latino in my 30's and living in southern Europe regular voice calls to family and friends really are not uncommon, but I can imagine it's not common among the North American/Anglophone demographic that's a majority on this site.

But texting is also a form of speaking to people although not using your mouth.

Voice calls, the worst part of a phone. Out of anything pub-sub it really has to be the worst medium in many aspects. Long gone are the polyphonic ringtones that tried to inspire answering, now I only see vibrating or blinking phones.

If I want to copy text from an app (often not allowed) I now take a screenshot and copy the ocr text from there. Same with badly coded websites etc. It saves a lot of time, and is always the same workflow.

Do you see what's wrong with this picture?

That we're accepting apps so bad that we normalized the workflow of the only way to extract text from them is screenshots and OCR.

Can you imagine having to deal with this shit on PCs as well?

I agree, but it solves the problem. You are talking about how it should be. I am talking about why these local AI features are useful to me.

On PCs we have Windows with candy crush ads, so I can indeed imagine.

Sure, but OCR doesn't need ML and high-end SoCs to work well.

We had great OCR in $50 printer-scanner combo devices for home users and those didn't have M1 chips but some dirt cheap HW and Windows software to do the OCR(most likely using the Tesseract library which runs on a toaster).

So the everyday need for ML in everything in our lives is greatly exaggerated.

I am answering to this quote of yours

> All ML gimmicks are nice to show off at events, pub gatherings and in reviews videos

with a specific example of how it is useful to me outside of the cases you mention. I am merely sharing my experience.

P.S. I wish Tesseract worked as well as you mention today on my >50$ pc. I am not an Apple fanboy but OCR for images is flawless.

It doesn't have to be Tesseract specifically, there are other OCR libraries that work better and are licensed by several products(I think Abby licenses theirs).

But that wasn't my main point. Similar to Tesla popularizing ML-driven self parking, which doesn't work any better than the PID/Kalman filter methods already in use by others for the past 10+ years, my point was that today we're seemingly shoehorning ML into solving problems that have already been solved by "boring" traditional engineering solutions for over 10 years now, just to feed the AI product hype, similar to the digital camera megapixel race, or other such nonsense that offered no measurable upgrade in quality but looked good on product stickers to move merchandise at higher prices.