The AI smartphones that never materialized in 2024

Every significant phone launch in the US over the past year has loudly announced that artificial intelligence (AI) is here and that ours is the AI phone you've been waiting for. Following each, there was a lot of cheering and positive stock price movement. However, the AI on those phones was, to put it mildly, disappointing when I first got my hands on them.

According to the notion, smartphones as we know them are changing to become AI smartphones. With the help of an AI-enabled voice assistant, you will be able to ask an AI smartphone to order pizza or send an email, eliminating the need for you to spend your entire day interacting with a grid of apps. Pointing your camera at a show flier will allow the AI to determine your availability and add the event to your calendar. It will look up information for you when you ask it about anything a buddy said to you, possibly in a text or an email, depending on which you're unsure of.

All of the above sounds fantastic to me personally. I would appreciate assistance with the tasks I complete on my phone a hundred times a day, as well as with the deluge of notifications and information I have to handle. Contrary to what you may have heard, AI smartphones are still a long way off. Rather, it feels like a series of tech demos that aren't really related.

You may currently use AI on your phone to respond to a text with a disco pigeon emoji or to edit an email to sound more professional. AI is available to translate phone calls, and it's actually rather useful. Additionally, AI has the ability to transform a beautiful image of food into something terrifying. We've been promised a platform revolution, but AI on our phones has only given one strange trick after another—sometimes amusing, sometimes fascinating.

2024's (ostensibly) AI smartphones
The big phone manufacturers are all to blame. With the January release of the Galaxy S24, Samsung kicked off the year with a loud announcement that "Galaxy AI is here." I wouldn't classify the devices it announced as AI smartphones, even though they are good smartphones that run a combination of Google's and Samsung's Gemini Nano versions.

They are supposed to help you remove distractions from your images, but they may actually make them more distracting. Making a dinner reservation is one situation where the phone's live language interpretation capability can be useful. However, my colleague's reply was also translated as "I am eating my chair." (She wasn't.) After the novelty wears off, the majority of consumers will discover that these AI features become less noticeable.

AI-enabled Pixels marked the early arrival of autumn hardware season later in 2024. For the past few years, Google has made significant use of AI in its phones, but the Pixel 9 series is where the company's Gemini AI is most prevalent. The weather app has an AI-generated summary at the top, a new app that uses AI to tag and preserve your screenshots, a new AI-powered default assistant, and several AI image production features that range from amusing to really concerning.

 A portion of it does seem helpful, especially the snapshots app, which is the kind of thing you could find useful if you frequently have bookmarks for endless Chrome tabs open on your phone. However, these capabilities, which are isolated within their individual apps, don't seem to be very related to one another. Gemini uses extensions to sort of tie everything together, but it's taking a while to add compatibility for other apps, and even with an extension, Gemini can only do so much.

Finally, in September, we got to see the iPhones that were "built for Apple Intelligence." The fact that the iPhone 16 came without Apple Intelligence at first, in my opinion, speaks much about the level of Apple's AI. With iOS 18.1, AI functions were finally released in late October. Additionally, this initial update was likely disappointing for everyone who was eagerly awaiting it.

As of right now, Apple Intelligence offers a new luminous user interface for Siri, tools to change the style of your writing, and summaries for emails and notifications. Summaries of notifications are typically humorous, but they can also be helpful. 

The writing tools are now standard, and Siri is basically the same old assistant with a new appearance. Although there is yet more to come, the current state of technology is undoubtedly insufficient for an AI smartphone.

An untidy AI year
This is a messy time for AI in general, not just for phones. AI is either on the verge of exploding or just a few months away from becoming a digital god, depending on who you ask. AI is being forced onto us in every way: it appears in Google search results, lurks in all Meta products, and uses your name to greet you in the Spotify app. When it comes to AI, it's difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise since it's so damn loud and pervasive!

Additionally, there may well be a signal there, particularly with regard to our phones. With an Apple Intelligence upgrade this spring that will enable it to take action in apps through a feature called App Intents, Siri may really become more helpful. Developers will be able to surface certain tasks so that Siri may access them at the system level, such as placing an order for the pizza that AI proponents keep promising. With Android 16, Google appears to be working on a similar approach that might help close the gap between Gemini and standalone apps that don't require a whole extension. Who knows? Bixby might also join the game.

The problem is that it's beginning to seem like the phone manufacturers are whining after a whole year of AI on our mobile devices that was meant to be revolutionary but ended up being nothing. Before our collective patience begins to wear thin, the true AI smartphones must emerge.