AI smartphones that never materialized in 2024

I’ve spent the past year covering every major phone launch in the US, and each one loudly proclaimed the same thing: AI is here, and ours is the AI ​​phone you’ve been waiting for. Each was followed by much applause and favorable stock price movements. But when I got those phones in my hands, the AI ​​was underwhelming to say the least.

The theory is that smartphones as we know them are evolving into something new: AI smartphones. An AI smartphone will be a new kind of device that doesn’t force you to interact with a grid of apps all day long; you’ll be able to ask it to order pizza or send an email just by using an AI-infused voice assistant. You’ll be able to point your camera at a flyer for a show, have the AI ​​check your availability, and add it to your calendar. You’ll ask it something a friend said to you — maybe in an email or a text, you’re not sure which — and it will find the information for you.

Personally, all of the above sounds good to me. I’d love some help with the tasks I do a hundred times a day on my phone — and with the firehose of incoming information and notifications I deal with. But AI smartphones aren’t here yet, not by a long shot, despite what you might have heard. Instead, what we have feels like a collection of loosely associated tech demos.

Right now, AI on your phone can help you write and rewrite an email to sound more professional, or respond to a text with a disco dove emoji. There is AI for translating phone calls, which works and is actually pretty neat. And there is artificial intelligence that can turn a good photo of food into something terrible. The AI ​​on our phones has pulled one weird trick after another: sometimes fun, sometimes interesting, but hardly the platform shift we’ve been promised.

All the major phone manufacturers are to blame. Samsung opened the year with its Galaxy S24 launch in January, declaring “Galaxy AI is here” on a hockey arena appropriate volume. To be sure, the devices it advertised are good smartphones, and they run a mix of Samsung and Google’s Gemini Nano models on the device, but I wouldn’t call them AI smartphones.

Supposedly, they can help you take distractions out of your photos—but you could end up with something even more distracting instead. The live language interpreter feature for phone calls can be handy for something like making a dinner reservation. But it also translated a statement from my colleague to “I eat my chair.” (She wasn’t.) Most users will find that these AI features fade into the background when the novelty wears off.

Later in 2024, the fall hardware season came early with AI-ified Pixels. Google has made a big deal about AI on its phones over the past few years, but the company’s Gemini AI is absolutely everywhere on the Pixel 9 series. There’s an AI-generated overview at the top of the weather app, a new app that saves and tags your screenshots using AI, a new AI-powered default assistant, and plenty of AI image generation tools — from the fool of serious concern.

Some of it feels useful, especially the Screenshots app, which is the sort of thing you might find handy if you tend to keep endless Chrome tabs open on your phone as bookmarks. But these features, embedded in their respective apps, don’t feel like they have much to do with each other. Gemini sort of connects the dots with extensions, but support for different apps is slowly being added – and even with an extension, Gemini can only do so much for you.

Last but not least, we met iPhones “built for Apple Intelligence” in September. I think it says a lot about the state of Apple’s AI that the iPhone 16 originally sent without Apple Intelligence. AI features finally arrived in late October with iOS 18.1. And if anyone was waiting with bated breath, this first update was probably underwhelming.

Right now, Apple Intelligence includes overviews for notifications and emails, tools to change the style of your writing, and a shiny new user interface for Siri. Message boards can be useful, but usually they’re just for fun. The writing tools are standard fare at this point, and Siri is basically the same old assistant with a new coat of paint. There’s more to come, but what’s here now certainly doesn’t measure up to an AI smartphone.

It’s not just phones; this is a messy moment for AI in general. Depending on who you ask, AI is either a massive bubble about to burst or a few months away from evolving into a digital God. AI is being forced upon us in every direction: popping up in Google search results, lurking in every Meta product, greeting you by name in the Spotify app. It’s hard to separate the signal from the noise when it comes to AI because the noise is everywhere and it’s so damn loud!

And there really can be a signal in there — especially when it comes to our phones. Siri could really become more useful with an Apple Intelligence update this spring that will allow it to take action in apps through something known as App Intents. Developers will be able to make certain actions visible — like ordering the pizza that AI advocates keep promising — so they’re accessible at the system level by Siri. Google appears to be preparing a similar framework in Android 16 that could help bridge Gemini and individual apps without apps needing a full extension. And who knows? Maybe Bixby will be in the game too.

The problem is, after a whole year of supposed game-changing artificial intelligence on our mobile devices that didn’t materialize, it’s starting to sound like the phone makers are crying wolf. The real AI smartphones need to rise soon – before our collective patience starts to wear thin.

Photograph by Allison Johnson/The Verge