Nothing Phone 3 Is Going All-In With AI But You'll Have To Wait A While

Carl Pei's at it again. The Nothing CEO is now building hype behind how the AI user experience might look like on the next Nothing Phone (3). He claims that it'll be different from other brands that are just slapping AI powers onto their products with little cohesion between user, apps, and device. On the surface, it seems like AI will be deeply infused into the new phone, but look deeper and Pei could be hinting that these features might come much later.

There's been a lot of hype around AI. Some great, some confusing. It’s great to see new companies rethinking the user experience and form factors. However, there is no doubt that smartphones will remain the main consumer AI form factor for the foreseeable future. With over 4… pic.twitter.com/ERJc7xhwBa

— Carl Pei (@getpeid) June 5, 2024

If anything, Nothing's CEO Carl Pei is definitely not camera shy. He revels in creating buzz and chatting up why his company continues to do things differently from its competitors. His latest video on X, for example, focuses on the need to better bridge current systems with new ones like AI. Pei says that the smartphone form factor is here to stay for the foreseeable future, yet even with AI this and AI that, "the user experience hasn't really changed for a long time".

He laments how companies nowadays promise AI integration, but ultimately fail to deliver on a cohesive interface. In the demo video, Pei introduces a couple of features that will make the Phone (3) the company's first true AI smartphone—one being an on-device personalized voice assistant while the other is a contextually aware dynamic homescreen. The latter looks like a natural AI-centric progression of the redesigned notification controls of recent Nothing OS versions, which harks back to Google Now days. To be honest, we hoped the voice assistant bit would be markedly different from other offerings, but ends up looking (and sounding) like a standard LLM chatbot with googly eyes.

Now, while Pei (and the video) does show the upcoming Nothing Phone (3), it's important to note that the focus of Pei's post is the AI interface. Based on his assertion that the demo is with early developmental prototypes, we can safely assume (based on this report) that the Phone (3) will not launch this year, and instead will make a debut in 2025. Nothing tends to release new phones in July, so it's interesting and wise that the company is skipping out the year and taking time to mature the AI aspect.