This year we've seen two approaches to ai in mobile technology: “ai that isn't your phone” and “ai that does random things on your phone.”
The “Not Your Phone” group includes devices like the Rabbit R1 and the Humane ai Pin, two small devices that sought to make ai more useful by incorporating it into a smaller, simpler device. It hasn't gone very well. Both devices came with big promises of helping us get things done without looking at our phone screens. None delivered.
Now is the time for Apple, like Google and Microsoft before it, to announce a host of ai features at its annual developer conference today. But the current state of ai in our phones is, well, mediocre. “ai doing random things on your phone” includes Google's generative ai tools like Magic Editor, Samsung Galaxy ai, and that sort of thing. Right now, it's a bunch of party tricks that range in quality from “somewhat useful” to “don't really work” to “oh dear GOD, no.” It's definitely not the bold new future of mobile computing we've been promised.
It's Apple's turn to defend ai as our daily assistant
The company that has come closest to showing us an artificial intelligence feature that could really save us some time is Microsoft. At its developer conference last month, the company announced Recall for its new Copilot Plus PCs, a feature that takes screenshots every few seconds of whatever you're doing on your computer so you can use ai to search for it later. I could use that yesterday. But maybe it's a good thing that Recall isn't more widely available yet; There seem to be serious security problems.
During its keynote today, it will be Apple's turn to champion ai as our daily assistant, and the signs so far are encouraging. Some of the rumors sound like things we've heard before, like ai voice memo summaries and transcriptions, but the most recent reports point to features with “broad appeal.” Siri would be a sensible home for things like that, and all signs point to a big update for the iOS virtual assistant. Most compelling of all, Siri might be able to do things on your phone for you. You know, the things virtual assistants have promised to do for the last decade.
However, Apple has to do a real balancing act to make this a reality. The company reportedly doesn't have a blockbuster LLM of its own ready to announce, so it will probably ring a bell: OpenAI. But public trust in that company isn't exactly at an all-time high, and Apple will have to square its emphasis on privacy with the need to move data to the cloud. It may have some clever privacy solutions at hand, but it seems likely that the age of ai will push Apple to rely more on third parties than it has historically preferred.
As always, Apple comes to the table with a big advantage: control of both software and hardware. In theory, that's something Google has with its Pixel phones, but it hasn't been able to do much with Android since it also needs to work for everyone else in the ecosystem. Google's recent reorganization suggests that it sees the advantage of hardware and software teams working more together, but for better or worse, Apple has a big advantage here. Even if the new and improved Siri can only access Apple apps at first, that's still a large number of apps that many people use daily.
One thing is clear: Apple, the company that was “late” to ai, finds itself with a gap in the field wide enough to drive a truck through.
