this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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A small Kickstarter-funded startup called Rabbit got attention with a similar concept recently, but they are a minnow compared to Deutsche Telekom.
I suspect AI will eventually come to be the predominant OS of all our computing in all our devices. To displace apps, all that is necessary is AIs trained to operate each one. After that, presumably new protocols will enable AI to interact with services and tasks. That's not all people use smartphones for though. How will they get AI to scroll through social media?
There are a lot of incumbents like Google & Facebook relying on us to stay doing things the old way. News like this from Deutsche Telekom must make them nervous.
There are many apps where replacing them with "AI" doesn't make sense. I prefer having a gallery app to playing twenty questions every time I want to show someone a picture I took last year. My bank isn't going to let me replace the credit card authenticator with whatever the Telekom has in mind. Neither can I expect this system to be able to replace any of my hardware-related apps. Not to mention games.
This works for people who use their smartphone for simple lookup tasks and maybe watching videos. Anything beyond that and we run into UI, support, and security issues that I don't think are resolvable.
And even if they did, I wouldn’t bloody want it to!
The separation and sandboxing of apps is a key security feature, I’m not going to give that up so that my SIM card provider can claim they’ve used AI in an effort to sell more phones…
AI isn't even close to being mature enough of a technology to be trusted with any personal or company secrets.
20 questions would be annoying. But, an AI that actually gets what you want first go, without scrolling and searching would be a step up.
But, I think it’s going to be more along the lines of book me a restaurant. Organise my emails and update me on anything important. Get rid of the rest that are marketing.
What’s in my fridge from my recent purchases that I can cook for dinner tonight?
There are a bunch of apps that are just wrappers to input and output data from systems. Calendar apps, childcare/school apps, booking apps, home automation apps, finance apps, search apps. Each could be easily replaced by ai.
An AI can enhance certain apps, yes. But outright replace them? My home automation system has a customized web UI that gives me all the information at a glance. That's hard to improve upon. Not to mention things like configuring new devices, which can get fairly involved.
Finance apps are sometime I don't expect an AI assistant as described to even be able to interact with. Some banks don't even let their own apps in if the phone appears to be rooted. They certainly won't let a third-party assistant in.
I don't think a phone as described in the article works for "advanced" use cases. Basic stuff, sure. But there's a lot of stuff it's not going to be able to do.
It won't replace them all, but that frustration of adding a device. Perfect for an AI that can wait for a restart of the device several times which seems to be the fix most often.
Finance apps may come down to a trust thing, but if access through an API is similar to authorization now, I can see it happening. Already some banks give access to third party apps.
Why have an app of you never use it. I would still expect the kind of apps to be replaced would have a web based log in version. For now. Many will keep the apps out of habit but new users probably wouldn't bother to download them unless they needed to, and guess what, the AI would probably seek them out and download them for you.
Luckily to them "Deutsche Telekom" is in Germany known to be aggressively incompetent.
Their main goal seemed to be to grab as much taxpayer money as possible and make mediocre services out of it, As the "Telekom-Cloud". They try to ride the recent AI wave without having a clue what they are doing I guess
Edit: clou ≠ clue
Incompetent and completely out of touch with reality. Crazy to think how big they once were.
*clue
It will fail because of the greed of companies. No company wants to just implement services for somebody else's AI phone. Otherwise, we would have had websites dominating vs. App ecosystems because it's cheaper to write a website that any standard browser will be able to visit. But App ecosystems allow data scraping.
I really don't want AI in charge of anything important in my phone or in anything in my life really.