If thereâs one job Iâd like AI to take from me, itâs my daily email deleting ritual.Â
Technology
The Pixel 8 is Google’s best opportunity to bring its AI ideas together under one roof
Made by Google is just around the corner, and we’re expecting plenty of AI features to fuel the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro — even if they fall short of an eventual AI assistant future.
Every morning at 8:30AM, Google Calendar pings me with a reminder containing just one word: EMAILS. Thus, my formal workday begins as I speed-delete nearly every email that landed in my inbox overnight. They are largely useless and clog up the space between legitimate emails that I need to read and respond to.Â
Imagine for a minute, though, if you could just tell an AI assistant to show you your most important emails and delete all the rest. I asked Google Assistant on a Pixel 7 Pro to do this, and it just wordlessly escorted me to my inbox so I could deal with it myself. Thanks a bunch.
Google, like almost every other tech company in the world, is all about AI right now. The company showcased a lot of new ideas for generative AI at I/O earlier this year â tools to help you compose a new message in Gmail, write a job description in Google Docs, and build a template for your dog walking business in Google Sheets.Â
Theyâre hit or miss. Sometimes theyâre useful: I asked it to expand a bullet point list of notes into some care instructions for my houseplants, and it added some helpful context about how often to water them. But often, the answers it gives you are obvious, like the weekly meal plan I asked Google Sheets to build for me. When prompted to come up with healthy meal and snack ideas, it had some good suggestions but left me to fend for myself in the snack column with âfruits, vegetables, nuts, or yogurtâ in every cell.Â
Then thereâs Bard â the AI chatbot that Google seemingly rushed out the door to compete with Bing earlier this year. It wasnât very impressive in its early state, though itâs gotten more useful throughout the year. With a recent update, you can give Bard access to your Gmail and Google Docs and ask it questions about them. Itâs actually pretty useful. I asked it to find any important emails in my personal Gmail, and it returned one about fresh hop week at a local taproom. You know me too well, Google.
Weâre now in the thick of Techtember, and Googleâs fall hardware event is fast approaching. Weâll see the Pixel 8 (thatâs no surprise â Google already told us in like 20 different ways), and what Iâm most interested to see is how it starts bringing together the companyâs various ideas about AI and its usefulness in our daily lives.Â
Right now, Apple is allergic to saying AI, and Microsoft has some computers to sell you but nothing shaped like a phone. If AI is truly going to take the pain out of our daily chores like every tech company wants us to believe, then the Pixel ought to be the device that shows us how that works. Iâm not all that interested in having generative AI write emails for me regularly when Iâm sitting at my computer, but I can think of a bunch of things Iâd like an AI assistant to be able to do for me on my phone.Â
For all its strengths, Googleâs current Assistant is still mostly a tiny repeating machine
Giving me a rundown of those important emails and interpreting them into reminders or to-do list items would be a good one, for a start. Iâd listen to Google Bard Assistant do that while I make my morning coffee. Maybe if I asked it to find a good time to go for a run, it could cross-reference my calendar and the hourly precipitation forecast, make a suggestion, and remind me 10 minutes before itâs time to head out the door. For all its strengths, Googleâs current Assistant is still mostly a tiny repeating machine. It can tell me when my next meeting is or the likelihood of rain today, but it canât put these two concepts together and make a suggestion.
Realistically, these kinds of features are still a ways off. One of the major barriers to letting AI run wild on your phone is processing power. AI needs a lot of it, and Google â like other companies â offloads the heavy lifting to the cloud when you ask Bard to summarize a document or write up a meal plan. Consequently, it takes a while â much longer than most of us would tolerate from an on-device assistant.
Googleâs custom Tensor chips are supposedly designed with the goal of doing more of this processing locally, but is its third-generation chipset up to the task? Given how common overheating complaints are about Pixel 7 phones, it seems unlikely that Tensor G3 will suddenly be ready to run a lot more complicated processes on-device. Still, even with Tensorâs current limitations, the Pixel 8 should offer us a glimpse of what AI can actually do for us.
Realistically, a full Bard-on-your-phone assistant is probably still cooking. Google has also taken a cautious approach to implementing generative AI, for better or worse, and the features announced at I/O are largely in beta. There was a report earlier this year that Google was shaking up the Assistant team and aiming to make the product more Bard-like, and my guess is that weâll see plenty of flavors of this future in next weekâs announcement.