Do people actually want this AI stuff in their phone? I don't want AI on my desktop/laptop computer and I don't want it on my phone either. None of my family or friends that I talk to seem to want it either.
For technical people, it's a privacy nightmare because it doesn't really work as advertised on the tin. The only way they can get it semi working is by pushing the request to the mothership and do processing there rather than locally on device which means privacy is an option. Also, be technically minded, some people developing these systems make more money on data harvesting than any other service, so local only prevents them from that precious data. So the local processing isn't just a technical problem, but one that interferes with their core business. Of course, none of that is advertised on the tin
And whenever they do use Siri, holding the button to talk to her, it is to set a timer.
Seeing how there are more non-techy than techy people, it feels like Apple has reached their target audience. If Apple depended solely on techy people, they'd need another bail out from MS or Googs to stay solvent.
I'm excited for it, and like Apple's high level privacy protecting narrative with the secure cluster stuff. We'll see if they're ever able to deliver.
Has the Pixel Gemini assistant gotten to that level? The Google Assistant was always better, and I know the switch to Gemini was a little rocky at first, but in theory it should be able to do that stuff, without all the privacy verbiage.
And the phone does consolidate many, many technologies that used to be disparate objects. Now, you can also live life without a camera, CD player or walkman, cookbooks, planner/calendar (i actually still use a paper one in addition to calendar/reminder apps), and letters coming in the mail, sure. But I don’t think you’ll get fat proposing that to everyone, and these are just a few examples. Not everyone is going to want to live a life of pure asceticism.
I think back on my parents’ stacks of mail and realize that searchable email is way better than that.
I also just bought concert tickets for a few shows in the summer. Yes, there is a paper ticket option, that you pay to have mailed to you. Have you ever lost a paper ticket before, or tried reselling them? Much easier to deal with with the AXS app.
A buddy visited a while back and getting him a transit card without using the smartphone option took about 30 minutes.
I think it’s just that after having centralized so many things into one device, there’s a new step function horizon to cross to make it more effective to use or come up with a new form factor.
Anything more ingrained or trying to be too clever or invasive, not at all. Microsoft has a funny example here, as what I describe is the consumer Copilot app. The Microsoft 365 Copilot experience seems the worst extreme, muddling the product, injecting itself across domains for dubious benefit. The rating in the app store of both of these 2 apps reflects this divergence.
On mobile, I could see the potential as a substitute for search engines, with pros and cons for it's style of information retrieval. Beyond that it's stretching the use case of LLMS
> Hey Siri, please play Emerald Rush, by Jon Hopkins on Youtube Music.
> Sorry, you'll need to continue in Youtube Music.
Then yes - I want AI on my phone
I could be wrong of course, but my intuition is that only that tiny fraction of the population already following LLMs would potentially not want AI Stuff on their phones.
If Apple made a voice mode as advance as ChatGPT, and no one used it, then you can throw away Siri all together (and i'd assume Apple has the data that shows people actually use the Siri)
Small tasks like that are things I spend a few minutes on several times per week and it's nice to have a contextual AI assistant that can handle those types of things.