Five simple ways to supercharge your Android with Google Gemini @davidlim, Auckland, New Zealand

25th December, 2024:  Auckland, New Zealand @davidlim 

Google Assistant has been part of the Android experience since its launch in 2016. You'll find it in the news feed on the left side of your home screen, as a sticky widget in the dock, or by saying the "OK Google" hot word. Still, with nearly every phone launch in the past year highlighting AI as a prominent feature, the assistant was due for a refresh.

Early adopters who used Google Gemini expressed its limitations, such as being unable to perform tasks that Google Assistant could. Much has improved as Gemini has become more capable, and here are a few ways you can put it to good use on an Android phone.

(5)  Use it as a conversational tool:  Talking on with the phone

We've been able to activate Google Assistant using a vocal command for years, but what usually follows is a specific query or action. With Gemini Live, you can start a free-flowing conversation by tapping the button next to the camera icon in the app. You can discuss any topic and receive relevant replies if the conversation doesn't breach the AI's policy. Talking out loud to my phone and hearing natural-sounding replies was a bit eerie, but I got used to it. While you can ask close-ended questions, Gemini Live shines when you engage in a back-and-forth conversation.

You can tap the screen during a conversation to interrupt Gemini or talk over it. You can choose between a handful of voices, which reflects when you use Live mode. I use Gemini Live to learn other languages, brainstorm ideas, and practice speeches. Its ability to respond in real time and convincingly makes this an exciting way to use an AI assistant on your phone.

(4)  Connect Gemini to Google apps:  Access your mail, calendar events, and tasks

You can use Gemini with Google Workspace apps like Docs, Gmail, and Slides with a subscription. On an Android phone, you can use the Google Workspace extension for free with Gemini to fetch and summarize emails, tasks, and other content associated with your Google account.

Gemini can relay a list of your latest emails or filter them using a sender's name. However, it cannot access attachments. I take most of my class notes on Google Docs, and asking Gemini to summarize documents is a useful feature. It can also skim your calendar to find an event you've been looking for.

You can ask Gemini to save tasks or notes. Entries populated this way show up with a Gemini tag in the Google Keep app. It also intelligently titles notes based on their content.

(3)  Control device settings:  Hey Google, turn off Wi-Fi
Gemini can turn off your Wi-Fi, but you must manually activate it to use the assistant again. A more useful list of device controls includes Bluetooth, location, auto-brightness, and flashlight settings.

You can request a chain of commands, like "turn off auto-rotate and then turn on mobile data," but Gemini can be finicky. Familiar actions like setting a timer or turning off alarms work fine.

One of my favorite uses of this functionality is to control music playback on my phone. It can play, pause, and skip songs as usual, but you can ask Gemini to rewind a song by 30 seconds. You can also command Gemini to take a photo with a custom timer. In contrast, I executed the same query on my iPhone with Apple Intelligence, and it set a timer for five seconds titled "photo." Thanks, Apple.

(2) Use it with third-party apps:  Spotify users, rejoice
Extensions on Gemini give you access to and control of more things on your device. Connecting to Google Workspace is neat, and you can expect more third-party apps to work with Gemini in the future. You can connect to your Spotify account and play songs from your playlists without launching the app and searching for one. From there, media playback control helps you find the perfect tune for the occasion.

If you are one of the three billion WhatsApp users worldwide, you can send messages or place a call to a contact using voice commands on Google Gemini. However, you cannot ask Gemini to read your WhatsApp messages or send media with your messages.

(1) Use Gemini in Google Messages:  A more streamlined way to chat with the AI

After sunsetting Hangouts and a failed attempt with Allo, Google figured out the messaging experience on Android. The various Google Messages features make it a great way to communicate with loved ones, especially with chats powered by RCS.

If you launch Google Messages and tap the Start chat button, you will notice the option to chat with Gemini. This opens a chat window where you can use Gemini's conversational side. You can ask it to write a birthday message, recite poetry, or generate images. Gemini in Google Messages cannot control device settings and doesn't work with other apps. However, it offers a more traditional way to chat with the assistant. You can send it photos of clothes, items, and food, but it doesn't respond to queries with images of people.

You also cannot ask Gemini to send a message via Google Messages. You can do that using the dedicated Gemini app. You can also use Gemini, like you could with Google Assistant, to call your contacts or search for the phone numbers of businesses around you. However, you cannot place calls or send texts based on your relationship with a person. Saying, "Hey Google, call my mom," is likely to dial someone else in your contacts list with the name "mom."

Gemini is still very fresh

Gemini now does more than it did on day one. You no longer need to choose between it and Google Assistant since device controls work with the AI assistant. Gemini also occasionally falls back to the Google Assistant extension for tasks it can't handle. It's unlikely that your time with Gemini will be sunshine and roses. It is still a large language model, and it hallucinates.

Sometimes, it refuses to perform actions like "turn on Bluetooth" despite being capable of doing so. In such cases, starting a new chat is an effective way to yield satisfactory responses. Most useful commands require you to unlock your phone's screen. Despite its restrictions, Gemini continues to gain functionality with new updates, like controlling smart home devices through the Google Home extension.

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How Apple's AI advances could make or break the iPhone 16 #davidlimnz

 Wall Street is predicting a rough 2024 for Apple's iPhone franchise because of a lack of interesting new hardware features. Could artificial intelligence software make an iPhone 16 shine brighter?

Some Apple stock bulls think so. Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring this month opined that 2024 "will be the year that Apple's 'Edge AI' opportunity comes to fruition," and that it could power the new crop of iPhones this fall to greater heights. 

Also: The iPhone 16 Ultra camera will integrate the biggest leap in photos since B&W-to-color 

Apple's iPhone sales, led by the current iPhone 15, are expected to decline by about 2% this year, according to estimates compiled by FactSet Systems, to 229 million units, as the current iPhone cycle underwhelms with merely iterative hardware features. 

But come 2025, wrote analyst Woodring, current Wall Street expectations for growth of 4%, to 237 million units, could turn out to be 15% higher if an iPhone 16 has enhanced AI capabilities.

"If we are correct, and new LLM-enabled software features drive an upgrade cycle, then we see the potential for up to 15% upside to our FY25 iPhone shipment forecast," wrote Woodring. The acronym "LLM" refers to "large language models" such as OpenAI's GPT-4.

Woodring speculates that the world will see details at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference this summer, "highlighted by an LLM-powered Siri 2.0 and a broader GenAI-enabled operating system that has the potential to catalyze an iPhone upgrade cycle." 

Why is "LLM-powered" such a big deal? To use large language models akin to OpenAI's GPT-4 requires a phone to go back and forth to the network, sending prompts and retrieving responses. Even on a desktop computer with an ethernet connection, the round-trip means waiting a while for a response. In a mobile device on a cellular network, relying on the cloud connection could result in one of those awkward moments where Siri seems brain-dead.

Also: iPhone 15 review: I spent a month with Apple's base model and found it more 'Pro' than ever

Instead, what's needed is to eliminate the cloud reliance and move more of the LLM processing locally, on the device. Apple already has what it calls the "Neural Engine" in the iPhone, a separate collection of circuits for running AI. However, the AI tasks performed by the Neural Engine -- tasks much less demanding than an LLM -- are likely to involve very carefully defined functions such as face recognition, where the use of the circuits has been carefully curated. 

Taking an off-the-shelf large language model and running it locally is bound to be a much more demanding task. 

Woodring bases much of his enthusiasm about this year's AI on a paper published this month by Apple researchers Keivan Alizadeh and colleagues, titled, "LLM in a flash: Efficient large language model inference with limited memory," which is posted on the arXiv pre-print server.

Also: Humane's aspiring smartphone-killer 'Ai Pin' may be the most 2023 product yet

The crux of the paper is that LLMs take up a lot of memory, and Apple has found a clever way to use the vast storage of the resident flash memory -- the stuff that holds the iPhone's files. With special software, an LLM can be easily moved into and out of main memory, DRAM, with the illusion of having a lot more DRAM than is typical on the phone.

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OpenAI releases ChatGPT app for iPhones, iPads #drmobileslimited, #aucklandreapir #iphonerepair #ipadrepair

ChatGPT is now a smartphone app, which could be good news for people who like to use the artificial intelligence chatbot and bad news for all the clone apps that have tried to profit off the technology.

The free app became available on iPhones and iPads in the U.S. on Thursday and will later be coming to Android devices. Unlike the desktop web version, the mobile version on Apple's iOS operating system also enables users to speak to it using their voice.

The company that makes it, OpenAI, said it will remain ad-free but "syncs your history across devices."

"We're starting our rollout in the U.S. and will expand to additional countries in the coming weeks," said a blog post announcing the new app, which is described in the App Store as the "official app" by OpenAI.

It's been more than five months since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, sparking excitement and alarm at its ability to generate convincingly human-like essays, poems, form letters and conversational answers to almost any question. But the San Francisco startup never seemed to be in a hurry to get it onto phones — where most people access the internet.

"We're not trying to get people to use it more and more," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told U.S. senators this week in a hearing over how to regulate AI systems such as those built by his company.

The delay in getting the product on phones helped fuel a rise of clones built on similar technology, some of which the security firm Sophos described as "fleeceware" in a report this week because they push unsuspecting users toward enrolling in a free trial that converts into a recurring subscription, or use intrusive advertising techniques.

Another privacy researcher, Simon Migliano, said the official ChatGPT app might eventually starve similar-sounding apps of new users, but that could take a while because many of those apps were given names deliberately intended to confuse people into thinking they already have the official app. They were also "hyper-optimized" to rank highly in Apple's App Store search results, said Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN.com.

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