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.
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.
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
clou
*clue
No thanks. The AI will just track everything you do and sell your predicted behaviour to advertisers, or, have it’s own agenda pre loaded by advertisers so it can nudge you into spending at the right places. Do not want.
Very lightweight article. Let’s consider a different marketing angle:
Scene: Deutsche Telekom boardroom
CEO: we want a way to differentiate our devices
CTO: you mean like back in the 00’s when we built our crapplets into the firmware for feature phones using our network, made them non uninstallable and permanent default for common operations?
CEO: yes, exactly! We used to have a Deutsche Telekom web browser, a DT messaging app, DT social media app…
CTO: Customers today wouldn’t go for that. They want iPhones and Google play store. Look what happened with Huawei.
CEO: we just need to convince them that they don’t need any of that… And make sure that they couldn’t install third party stuff after market…
CTO: so a phone with no apps then?
CEO: no, a phone with one app that can do everything, that we control.
CTO: how are we going to sell a phone with a single pre installed app and convince customers that it’s better than having an app store? How can we convince them it can do everything?
CEO and CTO together: We call it AI interface!
