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99% of smartphone consumers don't care about 'ML performance' as a primary concern. People care how fast apps open, and battery life. From the perspective, th
by silisili 3y ago
99% of smartphone consumers don't care about 'ML performance' as a primary concern. People care how fast apps open, and battery life. From the perspective, the tensor chips are pigs that nobody is excited about.
- stavros 3y agoI very much do care if my phone understands my questions accurately when I ask them, and doesn't return irrelevant results, though. Nobody says "yeah Siri is crap, but have you seen that power usage?!".
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoHonestly, I haven't met many people who speak to their phones. [edit: where I live. Can't speak for the north American/Anglophone market] They usually use their phones to speak to other people, hence why signal reception and battery life is one of the most important things I look for. All ML gimmicks are nice to show off at events, pub gatherings and in reviews videos("hey look at what my new phone can do, yeah it looks the same as the one from last year and the year before, but can your phone do THIS? <insert ML gimmick of swapping people's heads in the picture>"), but won't help me if the signal reception quality sucks and drains my battery. Phones need to work good as phones first and foremost. High-end compute abilities come second. My most used ML gimmick is ChatGPT which doesn't run on device anyway, nor is it something I need in case of emergency like you know... being able to call someone to come pick me up/help pe when I need it the most. So IMHO bad modems like the ones in Pixel phones, are inexcusable in a phone no matter how fancy the other features are.
- matthewmacleod 3y ago_They usually use their phones to speak to other people_ Counterpoint – I haven't met many people who use their phones to speak to other people. YMMV.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoCould be a generational and culture thing as well, being Latino in my 30's and living in southern Europe regular voice calls to family and friends really are not uncommon, but I can imagine it's not common among the North American/Anglophone demographic that's a majority on this site. But texting is also a form of speaking to people although not using your mouth.
- tonoto 3y agoVoice calls, the worst part of a phone. Out of anything pub-sub it really has to be the worst medium in many aspects. Long gone are the polyphonic ringtones that tried to inspire answering, now I only see vibrating or blinking phones.
- unfamiliar 3y agoWith all due respect, I think you're wildly out of touch with how most people use "phones" these days. Actual calls probably represent about 5% of my phone use. The term "phone" is essentially a historical misnomer at this point.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoMaybe being in my mid 30's I'm too old to be up to date on this but what do people who aren't "out of touch" use their phones nowadays for? Some form of 'Apps' I'm guessing. And for those apps to serve their purpose (excepting the likes of Candy Crush and Genshin Impact) what do those apps need? Internet connectivity right? Which is received via the same modem as the calls, right? So a sucky modem will negatively impact battery life and app usage in challenging environments just as much or even more as call capabilities, right? Am I close?
- auxfil 3y ago[dead]
- bumblebee977 3y agoOh you are spot on. The confusion was probably just about saying it's a phone first. I'm in my mid 30s as well and the only time I call someone is when I contact my mother. I think with the younger generation it's at a point where calling someone is seen as intrusive. If you are calling me you are taking my choice away on when to deal with whatever you've got. Or at least are interrupting me with the attempt itself. So it better be important.
- eurekin 3y agoSo on point. And even when it actually phones 90% of the time I just dodge it. That 10% left is pagerduty. All real contacts use some form of a messaging app instead
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoCan't concur at all Won't work where I live now in south-centeal Europe (Austria ) where everything is archaic and most services are still done via phone calls like in the past: appointments for plumbers, doctors, recruiter call-backs to job applications, etc. Almost none of those services here use email or apps as the default, everyone seems to prefer sync communication so they first tries to reach you on phone. If you don't answer or call back they'll assume you're ghosting them and don't need the appointment/service anymore and you'll miss out on important issues. Sometimes they'll leave a voicemail telling you to call them back when you can, so you can never really escape calls here without emigrating. You can say we both live in completely different bubbles but the existence of one does not invalidate the other.
- chezelenkoooo 3y agoI think people don't speak at their phones simply because the experience is so horrible. I would LOVE to be able to voice control the various aspects of my phone but it's so mind numbingly frustrating that I'm annoyed just thinking about it. If it was better I would sacrifice other features for it.
- boznz 3y agoTotally agree, the second I have to switch from a normal voice to a stupid voice with the correct nuances for the unit to "work" is usually the last time I use it. Our google home basically sits there all day waiting for my wife to say "play abba", she has a strong non-English accent and it's about the only thing it seems to pick up. Don't get me on cars where I have to say the exact sentence to do anything.
- mejutoco 3y agoIf I want to copy text from an app (often not allowed) I now take a screenshot and copy the ocr text from there. Same with badly coded websites etc. It saves a lot of time, and is always the same workflow.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoDo you see what's wrong with this picture? That we're accepting apps so bad that we normalized the workflow of the only way to extract text from them is screenshots and OCR. Can you imagine having to deal with this shit on PCs as well?
- mejutoco 3y agoI agree, but it solves the problem. You are talking about how it should be. I am talking about why these local AI features are useful to me. On PCs we have Windows with candy crush ads, so I can indeed imagine.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSure, but OCR doesn't need ML and high-end SoCs to work well. We had great OCR in $50 printer-scanner combo devices for home users and those didn't have M1 chips but some dirt cheap HW and Windows software to do the OCR(most likely using the Tesseract library which runs on a toaster). So the everyday need for ML in everything in our lives is greatly exaggerated.
- mejutoco 3y agoI am answering to this quote of yours > All ML gimmicks are nice to show off at events, pub gatherings and in reviews videos with a specific example of how it is useful to me outside of the cases you mention. I am merely sharing my experience. P.S. I wish Tesseract worked as well as you mention today on my >50$ pc. I am not an Apple fanboy but OCR for images is flawless.
- 3y ago
- RantyDave 3y agoUnless they can do something that was going to have to be run on the CPU - and use less power doing it. I think we're rapidly getting to the point where this AI stuff is no longer optional.
- senkora 3y agoiPhones have all sorts of little niceties that are directly enabled by good ML performance. For example, automatic OCR of text within images, even on websites. I think the facial recognition for grouping photos by person is also done locally by the ML chip.
- baybal2 3y ago[dead]
- ssijak 3y agoEverything in photos ML related is done locally. I guess that is one of the reasons results are not great for now.
- alpaca128 3y agoThey even recognize objects within pictures so you can search pictures via their contents. It seems to work offline, though it can take a while for the phone to run it.
- andylynch 3y agoThis feature works surprisingly well- for example, at some point my IPhone recently gained the ability to recognise individual pets by name. This was super exciting for my kid!
- geraldhh 3y ago
- matthewmacleod 3y agoThat's a bit reductive. They also care if their apps work _well_ – if their pictures look nice, if their dictation is responsive, if their assistant understands queries, if OCR is accurate… which is all about "ML performance".
- alpaca128 3y agoI do care about my phone doing OCR and other tasks locally without Google, and tensor chips are the reason this can be done without draining the battery too much.
- madeofpalk 3y agoYou're right that 99% of smartphone consumers don't care about 'ML performance', but they do care about autocomplete being good and fast. Or photos doing object detection to create stickers for messages. If you're able to offload these 'everyday' tasks to a lower power chip, you also extend battery life. Something they care about :)