Company CEO Carl Pei said Wednesday that the Phone 3 may not launch until next year as the company focuses on building dynamic, personalized AI experiences that will be integrated within the device. This comes just days after the company posted 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 about the rumored CMF Phone 1. The company also revealed how integrated AI chatbots will work on future Nothing smartphones.
Phone 3 can’t be delayed until next year
In a video posted to This suggests that the company will join the ranks of Samsung, Google, and Oppo in building AI in-house. Features of the device. In the video, he added, “I expect to see some of these features in Phone 3 next year.”
There has been a lot of hype about AI. Some are great, some are confusing. It’s great to see a new company rethinking user experience and form factors. However, there is no doubt that smartphones will remain the primary consumer AI form factor for the foreseeable future. 4 or more people… pic.twitter.com/ERJc7xhwBa
— Carl Peid (@getpeid) June 5, 2024
The wording is a bit confusing as it could be understood to mean that the Phone 3 is scheduled to launch next year or that these features will first launch on the Phone 3 next year. This was the only mention of the Phone 3 in the entire five-minute video. However, given the emphasis on AI and experience integrating AI, it is likely that smartphones will come with these features by default.
Nothing annoys your AI companion
“Smartphones will remain the primary consumer AI form factor for the foreseeable future,” Pei emphasized, noting that the company has been designing and prototyping AI interactions for the past two months. He also shared a short demo of the products Nothing has built so far, saying that the right integration of hardware and AI is important to create useful features.
In the video, Nothing claims that it is designing AI that will work across devices. Calling it AI Companion, the smartphone maker showed off an AI that appears right on the phone’s onboarding screen and asks the user a few questions.
There’s nothing to say that these answers will help you personalize the AI according to your needs. A new home screen interface was also shown, with several square widget-like boxes displaying dynamic and contextual information. According to the company, this too is being curated by AI.
Pei also argued that building fun experiences on smartphones is limited by apps that don’t share data with other apps, and that the future of phones is a “world after apps.” This was also evident in the demo. In one home screen layout, the AI companion occupied the bottom of the screen and widgets occupied the top. There’s no word on how to add proactive features to AI that can be accessed through the home screen, lock screen, glyph interface, or even through earphones.
According to the video, there appears to be no attempt to integrate an on-device AI chatbot that can be powered by an in-house Small Language Model (SLM). While acting as a virtual assistant, you get additional AI features, including real-time voice responses, access to customize and change your home screen layout, and receive information from third-party apps to manage more tasks across your devices. However, these are just our guesses and unless anything is officially announced, let us find out what the AI companion will do.
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