The Nothing Phone 3 may not arrive until next year as the company focuses on creating dynamic and personalized AI technologies that will be integrated into devices, CEO Carl Pei said on Wednesday. This comes just days after the company published a post on social media that appeared to be a teaser for the successor to last year’s Nothing Phone 2, but could also be for the rumored CMF Phone 1. The company also shared a short demo of how the integrated chat AI bot will work on future Nothing smartphones.
Phone 3 cannot be postponed until next year
In a video posted on 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 ranks of Samsung, Google, and Oppo to build in-house AI. features for your devices. During the video, he also added, “Expect some of these features to start appearing in the Phone 3 next year.”
There has been a lot of hype around AI. Some are great, some are confusing. It’s great to see new companies rethinking user experience and form factors. However, there’s no doubt that smartphones will remain the primary consumer form factor for AI for the foreseeable future. With over 4… pic.twitter.com/ERJc7xhwBa
— Carl Peid (@getpeid) June 5, 2024
The phrasing is a bit confusing, as it can be understood that either the Phone 3 will launch next year, or that these features will first appear 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 focus on AI and creating an integrated AI experience, it is likely that the smartphone will receive these features out of the box.
Nothing beats an AI companion
Emphasizing that “smartphones will remain the primary consumer form factor for AI for the foreseeable future,” Pei said the company has been developing and prototyping AI interactions for the past two months. He also said that the right integration of hardware and AI is essential to create useful features, and shared a short demo of what Nothing has built so far.
In the video, Nothing claims to be developing artificial intelligence that will work on all devices. Calling it an AI companion, the smartphone maker demonstrated that the AI appears right on the phone’s input screen and asks the user a few questions.
There is nothing to suggest that these responses will help personalize the AI to the user’s needs. A new home screen interface was also shown, with several square widget-like windows displaying dynamic and contextual information. According to the company, it also oversees AI.
Pei also said that smartphone entertainment is limited to apps that don’t share data with other apps, and said the future of phones is a “post-app world.” This was also teased in the demo. In one home screen layout, the AI companion took up the bottom half of the screen and the widgets took up the top half. It goes without saying that it’s finding ways to add proactive capabilities to the AI, which can be accessed through the home screen, lock screen, glyph interface, and even headphones.
Judging by the video, it looks like Nothing is trying to integrate an AI chatbot into the device that can run on an internal small language model (SLM). Acting as a virtual assistant, it can gain additional AI capabilities, such as real-time verbal responses, access to customize and change the home screen layout, and receive information from third-party apps to manage more tasks on the device. However, these are just our guesses, and we’ll find out about the AI companion features when Nothing makes an official announcement.
