The way we talk to our phones will be entirely different in 2025 compared to 2024. At the moment we think about AI on our phones as being a mild curiosity, but that’s about to change. We’ll be able to ask our phones to perform complex tasks for us in a way that’s going to start becoming normal incredibly quickly. It will be like we’ve all got a personal assistant in our pockets that can do pretty much any task we ask it to.
Want it to find you a flight to Hong Kong on Monday evening? No problem. Want it to find you a restaurant that has great vegetarian options for tonight, and email the location to your date? No problem. Want it to send you the top stories from TechRadar every Friday at midday? No problem. (I’m sorry for the shameless self-promotion in that last suggestion, but you get the idea.)
A whole new world
And it's all going to happen very quickly. This January OpenAI has already released ChatGPT tasks. This is still in beta form, so a bit of a work in progress, but is currently available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Teams users, and will let you set reminders for ChatGPT to notify you about things in the future. So, you could ask it to send you a breakdown of the top stories from CNN every Monday morning, for example. It’s only a first step towards the real breakthrough, the autonomous AI agents that ChatGPT has been promising us for what feels like ages now, but still feels significant.
More excitingly Samsung is about to upgrade its AI offering at its Galaxy Unpacked event on 22 January to something really special. The company has already teased what it will be with the release of a video trailer of a busy woman in an office – we know she’s busy because she says she’s “off to her next meeting” – asking her AI assistant to book a pet-friendly Italian restaurant with outdoor seating and email the details to her friend Luka, and put it in her calendar.
Samsung’s virtual assistant, called Bixby, is already in its Galaxy phones, but this sort of functionality is beyond what it’s currently capable of, so it looks like Bixby is about to evolve into a true AI virtual assistant before our very eyes. The questions that remain, and that will be answered on the 22nd, are what exactly it will be capable of and what hardware you will need to run it.
This year we're also going to get an important Apple Intelligence update from Apple, which is likely to arrive around March or April. iOS 18.4 will give Siri onscreen awareness, i.e. the ability to look at what’s happening on your phone, so it can take action on what you’re looking at. It will also get personal context knowledge, so it can act more like a personal assistant with direct access to your calendar, email, and messages.
Jarvis is coming
Google has its Gemini AI which is creeping into everything from your browser to your car, but even more importantly, it also has Jarvis AI, its AI assistant, which will be able to do much more. Jarvis can browse the web for you, which means you can ask it to do anything that you can do in a web browser.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is focusing its Microsoft Copilot 365 AI agents on solving our trickiest business problems. Meta will be flooding social media with autonomous AI bots and X won't be far behind.
In fact, it feels like only one big name in the technosphere is absent here, and surprisingly it's one of the early pioneers in the virtual assistant space – Amazon. Despite a strategic collaboration with Anthropic to use its Claude AI, Amazon has been slow off the mark to equip Alexa with AI capabilities. Rohit Prasad, Amazon's AGI team's head scientist recently talked to the FT and acknowledged the delays, but said that Amazon has plans to fully transform Alexa’s brain through a kind of "transplant" to swap out the old question-answering style Alexa for the type of conversational chat you get with generative AI models.
It better hurry up, because with Samsung leading the way next week with Galaxy Unpacked, and the other big names not far behind, Amazon risks Alexa being left in the AI wilderness.
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