Samsung is announcing new phones this week, and they will be the most ai-enabled phones they have ever had. That's not an assumption, although it would be easy after CES 2024 to “Put a ChatGPT on it.” No, Samsung tells us this in the loudest way possible, including putting it in the sphere, which is the equivalent in 2024 of shouting it from the rooftops. But what exactly is ai on a phone like? So far, a handful of technical demonstrations have been made. This week's Galaxy Unpacked event is an opportunity to show us the potential of ai on a mobile device. And unlike a washing machine with ChatGPT pre-installed, ai could actually be useful on our phones.
ai appeared in a big way in 2023, but as a tool on our mobile devices, it has not appeared until now. That has simply been the reality of our current technology; The massive language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT simply can't run on our phones. You can download a ChatGPT app that runs queries in the cloud, but it can't tell you if an important email just arrived. Things are slowly changing: the Pixel 8 Pro arrived in October, capable of running Google's base models on the device, and some ai-powered updates are promised later. But so far, only a couple of them have arrived and they are a bit disappointing.
A December software update added the ability to use ai to summarize Recorder transcripts, a feature I immediately used because I'm a fan of the Pixel Recorder app. But it can't support long recordings; anything longer than 10 minutes seems to be off-limits. That ruled out most of my recordings. Video Boost arrived in the same update, billed as Night Sight for videos. Is good, but the effects aren't as dramatic as Night Sight is for stills, and you may have to wait an hour or two to see your video while it's processed in the cloud.
Still, there's something more promising in the works. At that Pixel launch event late last year, Google announced Assistant with Bard, its ChatGPT-style ai chatbot. Bard has not been the same most Impressive ai from the start, but it's been steadily gaining useful capabilities – transforming it into an assistant capable of performing tasks much more complex than setting a timer would be a step in the right direction. And judging by Samsung's Unpacked teaser images, Bard might have something to do with this week's announcements.
Could the Galaxy S24 series launch with some version of Bard? Where would Bixby be in all this? Do you remember Bixby? It would seem unusual for Google to launch its ai masterpiece with a competitor's phone, but then again, Samsung sells more Android phones than Google by a wide margin. The ai era could turn these enemies into even closer collaborators.
There's clearly a lot more that ai can do on our phones, and the clearest vision of this future so far hasn't come from Google or Samsung. Actually, it wasn't a phone at all: it was the Rabbit R1, the big hit of CES 2024. It's a small device designed by Teenage Engineering that acts as an ai assistant for your phone. You grant it access to your apps and accounts and then ask it to do things like book a flight or order a pizza. Instead of opening apps and scrolling through menus, it will supposedly do the hard work for you. The dream!
It's compelling, even if it seems likely to be swallowed up by phones themselves in the future. But if you're looking for an indication of how prepared people are to use ai to help manage their digital lives, look no further than the tens of thousands of people who pre-ordered the R1 within the first week.
Clearly, we're ready to take a break from the tedious work of tapping our phones all day – will the Galaxy S24 show us what that future will look like? Or will it just be another tech demonstration?
