3 ms·

The A.I. In Google's New Pixel 11 Is Not Helpful

51 points by cdrnsf 2mo ago

cmiles8 2mo ago
Has anyone been asking for these features? It would appear not. But hey it let some product manager check the “we got some of that AI” box.
- dude250711 2mo ago
  Google is like Microsoft a year ago. Talk about being late to a trend...
auntienomen 2mo ago
There are days when I suspect Google does not believe in doing user research.
- breppp 2mo ago
  It's just a rehash of the good Google+ days. This time instead of get your money for stamping social on everything, it's AI
- matherial 2mo ago
  A common way of thinking at Google and other big tech companies is that you're not building for your current users. Your current users will hate it if you move or change the color of a single button in Gmail. Also cue the "faster horse" aphorism. You're building for the next billion users instead. But of course, the problem with Google is that they already have basically every person on the planet as their customer, and their ideas for how the future should look like aren't exactly transformative. The Gmail UX in 2026 is not radically different / better than in 2016. The same goes for Chrome - there's a lot of changes under the hood, but the user experience is essentially the same. Android phones have better cameras and displays compared to ten years ago, but the software functionality is once again very similar. So I guess they're in the same spot as Microsoft, trying to innovate in a mildly user-hostile way, looking for an audience that doesn't exist?
  - Terr_ 2mo ago
    > But of course, the problem with Google is that they already have basically every person on the planet as their customer Yeah, this is partly a story of finance, where companies want to be seen as "growth" companies... even when all the low-hanging fruit of "get more customers" is mostly gone.
- realharo 2mo ago
  Flashy features often seem more targeted at tech reviewers and impressive demos than actual day-to-day use. Like movies having some scenes purely because they look good in a trailer.
650 2mo ago
Google is entrenched with career opportunists who are self serving, and are, excuse the lack of a better word, shitting out work to move stupid KPIs and continue the bureaucracy. A bloated Product org that advocates that something must be done, and is not focused.
whatsThisBtn4 2mo ago
Not sure if I have a 10 or 11 but I disagree. Although I think these features were in whatever pixel I had before. Adding events to calendar is my most common use case. I also have AI look at the screen and do stuff. My biggest complaint here, it doesn't go far enough. If I take a picture of contact info, I want it to be added, I don't want to go through the extra step of downloading a contact card. I really want an OpenClaw-like AI for my phone.
- neaden 2mo ago
  I have a 10 and find the AI to be more annoying than anything else. Mostly I see it when I accidentally hit something and it pops up since they want it to be quick to access but I essentially never want to use it. The fact that they are going to be replacing the perfectly fine Google Assistant with the Gemini which when I tried it out was so much worse at doing the simple things I actually use it for has me regretting buying a Pixel.
  - whatsThisBtn4 2mo ago
    I agree, I've run into that too. Is it a gesture or something? They already hijacked the power button, how is it turning on again. But otherwise the calendar setting alone is pretty amazing. I just take a bunch of pictures of events and they get in my calendar.
- arccy 2mo ago
  11 was only just announced...
- gonzalohm 2mo ago
  How long does it take you to add a calendar event manually? Takes me like 30 seconds I feel like companies are pushing AI for stuff that saves a minute of your time in exchange for huge privacy red flags and sloppy updates
  - phil21 2mo ago
    I despise small tasks like this, so I never really do them until forced. Having a full time human personal assistant would be best, but this sort of thing is an alright middle ground for me until I make my first billion. Good point re: the privacy concerns though. Ideally this sort of basic virtual assistant stuff will be on-device at some point. I really do hope we get to the point of Star Trek style “computer, do task X” and it mostly Just Works. As I get older the less and less I want to futz around with building things computers should just be good at already. AI has already given me new interest in home sensor networks and such since I don’t need to spend so long doing the IT drudge work I’ve done 2 dozen times before in my life and gain no intellectual stimulation from.
fsh 2mo ago
I'm glad that my 9a has little enough RAM to be spared the worst of Google's on-device LLM features.
mullenba 2mo ago
Unserviceable phones + features people don't want = Endless price increases and shareholder value!
dgellow 2mo ago
Apple complete failure early on with Apple Intelligence was really the best business move ever. I’m so, so glad my device has no agentic stuff. They learned their mistake, didn’t double down, let the others spend their money and energy trying to figure out what that whole AI thing is about. Just a perfect timing
yomismoaqui 2mo ago
I was tired of waiting for Google to make something as powerful as Openclaw on my Android and so I did it myself. I have Gmail & calendar control, web search, alarms, maps, contacts & phone, scheduled tasks & tasks triggered by things like notifications (I'm planning reacting to geofences & other events). You can create scripts to execute all these tools in a deterministic way & custom skills you can create to mix & match all these tools. For example I created a script that handles sending a message using Telegram reading the screen and tapping things using the accessibility service, it feels like magic. Right now I'm using models from Gemini API & Openrouter (deepseek flash v4 0731 is cheap & good enough). All data is in my phone This is not to brag is just to show how relatively easy you can do this on your Android phone. With an agenting loop, skills with tools (loaded on demand), and things like device control via accessibility service can do almost anything.
- tantalor 2mo ago
  An ironic comment, considering the article says "nobody wants this AI stuff", meanwhile you are asking for maximal AI.
  - yomismoaqui 2mo ago
    Is more about trying to see the limits of what an agent can do on my phone. There are some scary security scenarios but this is just hacker curiosity and a nice way to see what it is behind an agent and learning about them in a practical way.
- mpalmer 2mo ago
  This is not to brag is just to show how relatively easy you can do this on your Android phone. You haven't really explained how it works or how you did it, so at the moment it does just sound a bit like bragging :)
  - yomismoaqui 2mo ago
    Ok, human produced wall of text incoming, hope you read it later ;) The core of an agent is an agentic loop, that is, you provide some tools to the LLM and you have a for loop that sends the user request to the LLM and if it wants to invoke some tools you do it and send the results aback to the LLM (and loop again). Also if the LLM returns some text you show it to the user. Then when the LLM has returned the last answer and there are no more tools to call you just exit the loop. This is all there is, I learned about it from this article https://ampcode.com/notes/how-to-build-an-agent https://ampcode.com/notes/how-to-build-an-agent. Right now I provide the agent some core tools that are always available from the start: - spawn_agent: The agent can create a subagent to do some task using another context, this way you can for example launch new agent to do some long thing and get just the result without filling the root agent context with junk. - load_skill: the agent can load a skill by its id. The lists of available skills is provided on the system prompt this way the agent can dynamically load something like "websearch" if it needs it to provide an answer to the user's request. In short: skills are just markdown with a description on their frontmatter section, this same description is what is used on the system prompt to give the LLM info about that this skill does. Also the skill has some tools that are enabled when that script is loaded. For example some tools on the skill that uses accessibility service to control the phone: - search_app_package: returns the package id from some text (e.g. search for "Whatsapp" get "com.whatsapp") - launch_app: launch app using package name - read_screen_content: returns a textual representation of the accessibility tree on screen (that is, you can read all things on screen and see which you can interact with) - find_element: finds element by text with optional type and flag for exact match. - click_element: clicks on element by the id returned by find_element (or an id from read_screen_content) - etc... Then as you can imagine using the LLM to call these kind of tools is slow, non-deterministic and it costs money, so the next step is allowing the agent to create scripts in JS that can invoke these tools. The typical use case is asking the agent to do something like sending a message using the whatsapp application and seeing it fumble around while it opens the app, taps things and writes text on the right input text (hopefully). Then in the same chat you ask the agent to create a script to automatize this and it does something like this (simplified JS pseudocode): result = await ("device.search_app_package", {text: "whatsapp"}) await call("device.launch_app", {package: result.package_name}) sleep(2000) result = await call("device.read_screen_content") ... Imagine that you have created a script to toggle your phone's flashlight and then you can "wrap" this script in a custom skill called "flashlight", this way it is added to the roster of available skills and if you later ask the agent to "turn the flashlight on" it will load this skill and know how to call the flashlight script with the right parameters. There are more details about the agent but this is the gist of it, ask about anything else if you want.
kazinator 2mo ago
https://archive.ph/wip/BhUIH https://archive.ph/wip/BhUIH (queued)
throwa356262 2mo ago
I think Samsung has the best amount of AI (once you turn off the Google crap). There are tons of things that work like magic. You don't even notice you are using AI. Even Bixby turned out to be uuseful. Although I have disabled the shortcut and generally don't use it much.
- SomeHacker44 2mo ago
  I have a Flip 7 and did the opposite - turned off all Samsung stuff. Maybe that was wrong? Can you give some concrete examples of useful Samsung AI stuff please?
  - throwa356262 2mo ago
    For example search and OCR in the gallery and camera app.
znasw 2mo ago
people buy pixels for graphene os. who uses the google os?
- wffurr 2mo ago
  There are dozens of you, dozens!

51 points by cdrnsf 2mo ago

Has anyone been asking for these features? It would appear not. But hey it let some product manager check the “we got some of that AI” box.

dude250711 2mo ago
Google is like Microsoft a year ago. Talk about being late to a trend...

auntienomen 2mo ago

There are days when I suspect Google does not believe in doing user research.

breppp 2mo ago
It's just a rehash of the good Google+ days. This time instead of get your money for stamping social on everything, it's AI
matherial 2mo ago
A common way of thinking at Google and other big tech companies is that you're not building for your current users. Your current users will hate it if you move or change the color of a single button in Gmail. Also cue the "faster horse" aphorism. You're building for the next billion users instead. But of course, the problem with Google is that they already have basically every person on the planet as their customer, and their ideas for how the future should look like aren't exactly transformative. The Gmail UX in 2026 is not radically different / better than in 2016. The same goes for Chrome - there's a lot of changes under the hood, but the user experience is essentially the same. Android phones have better cameras and displays compared to ten years ago, but the software functionality is once again very similar. So I guess they're in the same spot as Microsoft, trying to innovate in a mildly user-hostile way, looking for an audience that doesn't exist?
- Terr_ 2mo ago
  > But of course, the problem with Google is that they already have basically every person on the planet as their customer Yeah, this is partly a story of finance, where companies want to be seen as "growth" companies... even when all the low-hanging fruit of "get more customers" is mostly gone.
realharo 2mo ago
Flashy features often seem more targeted at tech reviewers and impressive demos than actual day-to-day use. Like movies having some scenes purely because they look good in a trailer.

650 2mo ago

Google is entrenched with career opportunists who are self serving, and are, excuse the lack of a better word, shitting out work to move stupid KPIs and continue the bureaucracy. A bloated Product org that advocates that something must be done, and is not focused.

whatsThisBtn4 2mo ago

Not sure if I have a 10 or 11 but I disagree. Although I think these features were in whatever pixel I had before. Adding events to calendar is my most common use case. I also have AI look at the screen and do stuff. My biggest complaint here, it doesn't go far enough. If I take a picture of contact info, I want it to be added, I don't want to go through the extra step of downloading a contact card. I really want an OpenClaw-like AI for my phone.

neaden 2mo ago
I have a 10 and find the AI to be more annoying than anything else. Mostly I see it when I accidentally hit something and it pops up since they want it to be quick to access but I essentially never want to use it. The fact that they are going to be replacing the perfectly fine Google Assistant with the Gemini which when I tried it out was so much worse at doing the simple things I actually use it for has me regretting buying a Pixel.
- whatsThisBtn4 2mo ago
  I agree, I've run into that too. Is it a gesture or something? They already hijacked the power button, how is it turning on again. But otherwise the calendar setting alone is pretty amazing. I just take a bunch of pictures of events and they get in my calendar.
arccy 2mo ago
11 was only just announced...
gonzalohm 2mo ago
How long does it take you to add a calendar event manually? Takes me like 30 seconds I feel like companies are pushing AI for stuff that saves a minute of your time in exchange for huge privacy red flags and sloppy updates
- phil21 2mo ago
  I despise small tasks like this, so I never really do them until forced. Having a full time human personal assistant would be best, but this sort of thing is an alright middle ground for me until I make my first billion. Good point re: the privacy concerns though. Ideally this sort of basic virtual assistant stuff will be on-device at some point. I really do hope we get to the point of Star Trek style “computer, do task X” and it mostly Just Works. As I get older the less and less I want to futz around with building things computers should just be good at already. AI has already given me new interest in home sensor networks and such since I don’t need to spend so long doing the IT drudge work I’ve done 2 dozen times before in my life and gain no intellectual stimulation from.

fsh 2mo ago

I'm glad that my 9a has little enough RAM to be spared the worst of Google's on-device LLM features.

mullenba 2mo ago

Unserviceable phones + features people don't want = Endless price increases and shareholder value!

dgellow 2mo ago

Apple complete failure early on with Apple Intelligence was really the best business move ever. I’m so, so glad my device has no agentic stuff. They learned their mistake, didn’t double down, let the others spend their money and energy trying to figure out what that whole AI thing is about. Just a perfect timing

yomismoaqui 2mo ago

I was tired of waiting for Google to make something as powerful as Openclaw on my Android and so I did it myself. I have Gmail & calendar control, web search, alarms, maps, contacts & phone, scheduled tasks & tasks triggered by things like notifications (I'm planning reacting to geofences & other events). You can create scripts to execute all these tools in a deterministic way & custom skills you can create to mix & match all these tools. For example I created a script that handles sending a message using Telegram reading the screen and tapping things using the accessibility service, it feels like magic. Right now I'm using models from Gemini API & Openrouter (deepseek flash v4 0731 is cheap & good enough). All data is in my phone This is not to brag is just to show how relatively easy you can do this on your Android phone. With an agenting loop, skills with tools (loaded on demand), and things like device control via accessibility service can do almost anything.

tantalor 2mo ago
An ironic comment, considering the article says "nobody wants this AI stuff", meanwhile you are asking for maximal AI.
- yomismoaqui 2mo ago
  Is more about trying to see the limits of what an agent can do on my phone. There are some scary security scenarios but this is just hacker curiosity and a nice way to see what it is behind an agent and learning about them in a practical way.
mpalmer 2mo ago
This is not to brag is just to show how relatively easy you can do this on your Android phone. You haven't really explained how it works or how you did it, so at the moment it does just sound a bit like bragging :)
- yomismoaqui 2mo ago
  Ok, human produced wall of text incoming, hope you read it later ;) The core of an agent is an agentic loop, that is, you provide some tools to the LLM and you have a for loop that sends the user request to the LLM and if it wants to invoke some tools you do it and send the results aback to the LLM (and loop again). Also if the LLM returns some text you show it to the user. Then when the LLM has returned the last answer and there are no more tools to call you just exit the loop. This is all there is, I learned about it from this article https://ampcode.com/notes/how-to-build-an-agent https://ampcode.com/notes/how-to-build-an-agent. Right now I provide the agent some core tools that are always available from the start: - spawn_agent: The agent can create a subagent to do some task using another context, this way you can for example launch new agent to do some long thing and get just the result without filling the root agent context with junk. - load_skill: the agent can load a skill by its id. The lists of available skills is provided on the system prompt this way the agent can dynamically load something like "websearch" if it needs it to provide an answer to the user's request. In short: skills are just markdown with a description on their frontmatter section, this same description is what is used on the system prompt to give the LLM info about that this skill does. Also the skill has some tools that are enabled when that script is loaded. For example some tools on the skill that uses accessibility service to control the phone: - search_app_package: returns the package id from some text (e.g. search for "Whatsapp" get "com.whatsapp") - launch_app: launch app using package name - read_screen_content: returns a textual representation of the accessibility tree on screen (that is, you can read all things on screen and see which you can interact with) - find_element: finds element by text with optional type and flag for exact match. - click_element: clicks on element by the id returned by find_element (or an id from read_screen_content) - etc... Then as you can imagine using the LLM to call these kind of tools is slow, non-deterministic and it costs money, so the next step is allowing the agent to create scripts in JS that can invoke these tools. The typical use case is asking the agent to do something like sending a message using the whatsapp application and seeing it fumble around while it opens the app, taps things and writes text on the right input text (hopefully). Then in the same chat you ask the agent to create a script to automatize this and it does something like this (simplified JS pseudocode): result = await ("device.search_app_package", {text: "whatsapp"}) await call("device.launch_app", {package: result.package_name}) sleep(2000) result = await call("device.read_screen_content") ... Imagine that you have created a script to toggle your phone's flashlight and then you can "wrap" this script in a custom skill called "flashlight", this way it is added to the roster of available skills and if you later ask the agent to "turn the flashlight on" it will load this skill and know how to call the flashlight script with the right parameters. There are more details about the agent but this is the gist of it, ask about anything else if you want.

kazinator 2mo ago

https://archive.ph/wip/BhUIH https://archive.ph/wip/BhUIH (queued)

throwa356262 2mo ago

I think Samsung has the best amount of AI (once you turn off the Google crap). There are tons of things that work like magic. You don't even notice you are using AI. Even Bixby turned out to be uuseful. Although I have disabled the shortcut and generally don't use it much.

SomeHacker44 2mo ago
I have a Flip 7 and did the opposite - turned off all Samsung stuff. Maybe that was wrong? Can you give some concrete examples of useful Samsung AI stuff please?
- throwa356262 2mo ago
  For example search and OCR in the gallery and camera app.

znasw 2mo ago

people buy pixels for graphene os. who uses the google os?

wffurr 2mo ago
There are dozens of you, dozens!