- AI gadgets need to integrate with your phone to be anywhere near good enough.
- Apple and Google are insurmountable in the mobile world.
- Any of those cool AI gadgets could just be apps.
All those little AI phone alternatives? They’ll never take off.
Your phone is a pocket computer bristling with sensors and a permanent internet connection. Anything a gadget like the Rabbit R1 or the Humane Pin can do, your phone can run in an app, and phones already have your location, contacts, email, agenda, photos, and know your family and what they look like. AI tools rely on this level of info to do their jobs—otherwise, they’re only good for telling you how old Ryan Gosling is, and they’ll probably even get that wrong. The problem is, they need a phone-like platform, and who can even think about building one of those these days?
“I’m sad about the Ai Pin because it—and a similar AI hardware product, the Rabbit R1—shows just how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies, most notably the Android-iPhone duopoly,” writes veteran Apple journalist Jason Snell on his Six Colors blog.
Lock-Out
To work well, AI needs a ton of data. It needs it when the AI model is initially being trained, and it needs it while you’re using it. If you ask an AI, “What’s that flower?”, it needs to see the flower. If you ask it to send a message to your brother and your mom, it needs to know who they are. It needs to know where you are, and where you’re going. If you want it to buy things for you, it needs your credit card details and account logins.
That’s a huge amount of work and requires a huge amount of trust. You have to commit to entering all that data manually, into an unproven platform running almost entirely on somebody else’s computers (aka in the cloud). The Rabbit R1 gets around this by using its AI to plug directly into all the online platforms you use, but it still needs to log in to them.
But you know what already has all that data? Your phone.
“Traditional wearables, such as fitness wristbands, are in the right place to collect good-quality biosignals, but they fall short on the interface and require an external smartphone,” Kelwin Fernandes a long-time AI specialist and CEO of NILG.ai told Lifewire via email.
“On the other hand, smartphones have a good UX but lack high-quality data about our surroundings (being in the pocket, there’s not much they can see).”
Ideally, then, your new AI pin, or AI glasses, or whatever would integrate tightly with your phone, sharing data back and forth for a seamless experience. The wearable could gather environmental data that connects your phone to the outside world, and in return, your phone could provide all the data and context required for the AI to be effective.
This requires that either Google and Apple allow such deep access to Android and iOS or, a company needs to build an entirely new smartphone-level platform and convince us to use it.
Insurmountable
It seems pretty obvious that neither Apple nor Google is going to allow this. Apple won’t even let you install apps unless it approves them and gets a cut. Even the likes of Microsoft have trouble building and popularizing a new mobile platform (remember Windows Phone?), so what hope does a startup have? The job is just too big, and too hard.
Rabbit has a good approach. It’s treating the web as the OS, which is already open for interoperability, and most of the services we use are in the cloud anyway. But the problem with the R1, that cool little orange handheld that is like a virtual assistant in a Tamagotchi, is that everything it does could just be done with an app. Running on your phone.
“I think there’s a niche for AI-powered wearables, although I think they will continue to be used in addition to—not instead of—our phones for the foreseeable future. It’s worth pointing out that Fitbit sales dropped by 28% year-over-year, and have been steadily declining this decade. So, yes, there’s a place for early adopters for wearable tech, but it may not gain the mass market appeal that Humane AI manufacturers hope for unless the technology evolves and improves,” Brian Prince, founder and CEO of AI educational platform Top AI Tools, told Lifewire via email.
The immediate future is more likely to be an AI-enhanced PAN, or personal area network. Apple has promised big AI changes to its platforms this year, and this could tie together the iPhone, the Apple Watch, and AirPods into a body-spanning AI web with all the advantages of wearables and the brain of the iPhone.
We’ll have to wait and see, but the future of AI gadgets is probably just your phone.
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- Why AI Isn't Going to Make Your Phone Obsolete
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