Apple has just taken the wraps off its iPhone 16 range, and a big part of the conversation focused on Apple Intelligence, the company's suite of AI tools. It follows announcements from Google, Samsung and a host of others who have been clamoring to extol the virtues of their own AI systems, and it cemented the truth of the matter: AI is the feature tech companies are using to outdo each other.
In previous years, a phone maker's biggest bragging right was how many megapixels its camera had. Before that, it was how big the screen was. And way before that it was how small the screen was. But as all phones have steadily grown into essentially slight variations on the same product, it's no surprise Apple and Google are looking at new ways to entice you to spend with them and not competitors.
AI has already been on your phone for years. Siri's voice commands are AI-based, and Google Maps route recommendations are AI-based. Even taking a photo using any kind of auto mode on your phone or a regular camera relies on some kind of basic AI to choose the best settings for the scene. But these were AI features that sort of blended into the background. Now, AI is front and center, and it's being used as the main selling point of the phones.
The Pixel 9 Pro is packed with AI features.
Andrew Lanxon/CNETI've just reviewed the Google Pixel 9 Pro, a phone that has a great design and a solid camera, but its major selling points are its AI features. From the Pixel Studio image generator to the Gemini Live conversational AI tool, the phone is all about AI -- as is Google's advertising for it. There's nothing subtle about the integration of the tools. Instead, Google made a real statement: It's all in on AI.
Apple's iPhone 16 launch event was a bit more subtle, focusing on wider features around the camera and the processor, but even those were infused with AI. The camera uses AI to improve its HDR algorithm, while the new processor was sold largely on the basis of how well it can handle on-device AI tasks.
While Apple didn't go into huge detail on specific AI features at its September event, it's only because it elaborated at great length during its Wordwide Developers Conference in June, where it discussed features like the notifications summary tool, the ability to rewrite notes into legible text and to edit together videos in your camera roll based on your typed commands.
Remember when companies like Nokia were fighting over who could make the smallest phone?
Andrew Lanxon/CNETThen there's the Clean Up tool for removing distracting objects -- a big feature also found in Google's AI -- and the updates to Siri that allow it to understand natural language and respond in kind, putting it directly against similar natural language processing seen on the new Pixel phones.
Whether Apple Intelligence is any better or worse than the Pixel 9's AI -- or the variety of Android phones that will be infused with Google's Gemini Advanced later this year -- remains to be seen. But the fact is, Apple and Google's big push into AI proves that these are the features all tech companies will be leaning on the most to tempt us to part with our cash.