Nothing Phone 3 skips 2024 launch to integrate AI experiences
Nothing Phone 3 may not arrive until next year as the company focuses on building dynamic, personalized AI experiences that will be integrated into its devices, CEO Carl Pei said on Wednesday. This comes just days after the company posted a social media post that appeared to teaser a successor to last year’s Nothing Phone 2, as well as the rumored CMF Phone 1. The company also shared a quick demo of how an integrated AI chatbot would function on future Nothing smartphones.
Nothing Phone 3 can be delayed until next year
In a video posted to X (formerly known as Twitter), Pei emphasized that Nothing is throwing its hat into the “consumer AI race,” implying that the company will join the likes of Samsung, Google, and Oppo in building in-house AI features for its devices. During the video, he also added, “Expect to see some of these features come with the Phone 3 next year.”
There’s a lot of hype surrounding AI. Some of it great, some of it confusing. It’s great to see new companies rethinking the user experience and form factors. However, there’s no doubt that smartphones will remain the dominant consumer AI form factor for the foreseeable future. With over 4 million… photo.twitter.com/ERJc7xhwBa
— Carl Pei (@getpeid) June 5, 2024
The wording is a little confusing, as it could be taken to mean either that the Phone 3 will launch next year, or that these features will arrive first on the Phone 3 next year. This was the only mention of the Phone 3 in the entire 5-minute video. However, based on the emphasis placed on AI and creating an AI-integrated experience, it is likely that the smartphone will arrive with these features out of the box.
Nothing plagues AI companion
Pei stressed that “smartphones will remain the primary consumer AI form factor for the foreseeable future,” saying the company has been designing and prototyping AI interactions for the past two months. He also said that getting the integration of hardware and AI right is important to creating useful features, and shared a quick demo of what Nothing has built so far.
In the video, Nothing claims it is designing an AI that will be functional across the entire device. The smartphone maker calls it the AI companion and shows the AI appearing directly on the phone’s onboarding screen and asking the user various questions.
Nothing says these answers will help personalize the AI based on the user’s needs. A new home screen interface was also shown off, with multiple square widget-like boxes that display dynamic and contextual information. This is also composed by the AI, according to the company.
Pei also said that building engaging experiences for smartphones is limited by apps not sharing data with other apps, and claimed that the future of phones is a “post-app world.” This was foreshadowed in the demo as well. In one home screen layout, the AI companion took up the bottom half of the screen and widgets took up the top half. Nothing said it would find ways to add proactive capabilities to the AI, which would be accessible via the home screen, lock screen, glyph interface and even the earbuds.
Based on the video, it appears that Nothing is attempting to integrate an AI chatbot into the device that could be powered by an internal small language model (SLM). While it will act as a virtual assistant, it could gain additional AI capabilities such as real-time verbal responses, access to customize and change the home screen layout, and receiving information from third-party apps to manage more tasks on the device. However, this is just our speculation and we will learn the AI companion’s features once Nothing makes an official announcement.
