AI Phone Apps

AI Phone Apps

There's an obvious opportunity to add AI functionality to phone apps. We've already seen Microsoft quick out of the gate in adding AI functionality to numerous products in their portfolio, some of which relates to accessing AI engines from your smartphone. However, at the time of writing, there hasn't been a lot of press about adding AI functionality to Google Android or Apple iPhone apps.

Probably they're not working on it at all. I mean, they're trillion-dollar companies, so they might as well rest on their laurels with their feet up on the desk, reading the newspaper.

Somewhat more likely is that we'll see a range of AI functionality coming to the key apps on your phone sooner rather than later. Apple is notoriously secretive about what it's planning, but there have been numerous hints that they're spending big on AI. Google's capabilities in the AI space are, of course, on full display with its PaLM models and the recently released Google Gemini. I expect to see AI functionality for phones in roughly this schedule:

• Core app features
• Secondary app features
• Developer toolkit features

The first steps will be AI functionality in the core apps from the vendors. For example, Google has announced that the Pixel 8 Pro is powered by the new Gemini Nano model.

On Apple iPhones we might see AI completions in iMessage or photo apps or enhancements of this type. Apple tends to make large advances in functionality without hyping the underlying technology, and Tim Cook has been more reluctant than the average CEO to utter the phrase “AI” in earnings calls. Nevertheless, expect AI to be under the hood in many upcoming product upgrades.

Note that this won't be native execution. Instead, this will be AI requests going up into the cloud from your phone, and the processing being done on high-end GPU systems. This is an expensive and massive-scale project for the phone vendors to complete. Microsoft has shown that it can be done with generative AI, and the other major tech vendors will follow soon enough.

The next level will be adding AI capabilities to third-party apps. Expect both Android Studio and Apple Xcode developer platforms to start offering AI capabilities on a service model. There are various rumors that Apple is working on something like this, and it makes strategic sense. On the other hand, adding AI functionality for third-party developers adds another level of complexity to the release (e.g. security, privacy, safety, regulatory compliance, etc.), so it will likely lag behind the appearance of AI functionality in the core phone apps that come directly from Google and Apple.

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