If you uninstalled social media, games, apps for taking flights and booking holidays, those for reading emails and managing chats, you would no longer have a smartphone as we know it. But you wouldn’t even go back to using an “old” mobile phone again – not with AI. More and more companies seem to believe that the future of smartphones is without apps: at MWC 2024 in Barcelona, T-Mobile presented its phone with AI at the center, an evolution of its T Phone. A device with which to interact directly with the voice: direct questions and precise answers that come from generative artificial intelligence. And it’s not the only device that imagines this future.
AI smartphones don’t need apps
A phone in which an AI assistant does everything for us. Deutsche Telekommajority shareholder of T-Mobile, thinks this could be the future of smartphone communication. And he wanted to give a taste of this evolution at the Mobile World Congress (MWC).
Il T Phone it is a phone already available in some European markets and will be the launch platform for this concept. The software update could take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI), eliminating the need for almost all the apps we have on our smartphone.
Generative AI will take the place of apps
The example that the T-Mobile team gives at its stand in Barcelona is that of booking a trip. Instead of navigating between different apps, just ask your phone to do it for you. The AI assistant will activate, perform the necessary actions without requiring direct intervention and complete the booking.
To make this type of interaction as natural as possible, comes thegenerative AI interface based on the work of Brain.ai. This technology allows the phone to anticipate and generate next actions, based on user goals. You can order food, find the right birthday present, get information on your favorite team’s upcoming matches and book tickets. The Brain.AI team explains to us that the phone will continue (for now) to have the applications to do this with a graphical interface. But he bets that, with AI, you will use it less and less.
The company demonstrated the capabilities of its AI assistant on the T Phone and on a reference design con il chip Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 by Qualcomm. In this second case, theAI processing takes place directly on the devicewhich makes the interaction safer and more immediate.
In both cases these are prototypes, Deutsche Telekom warns that the actual product will take “some time” before arriving on the market. But there are more and more devices that want to replace smartphone apps with AI.
At CES 2024 we had met Rabbit R1, a portable device that uses artificial intelligence and natural language to replace apps. In this case, the ambition is to replace many features of a smartphone and its apps with an AI device that costs 199 dollars. And a few days ago, Amazfit promised to remove apps from smartwatches too with its Zepp Flow.
A tomorrow without apps probably remains distant for the moment. Whether it is to watch videos on YouTube and TikTok, or to shoot these videos, a smartphone with apps remains essential. But AI really could change the phones interfacemaking it easier to use them with natural language. Perhaps one day we will no longer need large screens full of different applications (or at least we will need them less and less). And our smartphone will truly become our digital assistant. What do you think about it? Let us know in the comments.
