Nothing’s Phone 3 will be completely focused on AI applications

Nothing CEO Carl Pei just published a video in which he makes two big claims: that smartphones are indeed the AI ​​gadget of the future and that AI could change the way we use these phones. “People love their phones!” Pei says in the video. But “the user experience hasn’t changed in a long time.” Everything is faster, prettier and easier, he says, “but the fundamental experience hasn’t changed.” Pei now thinks that’s about to change.

I should note that Pei casually mentions the existence of the Phone 3, which was rumors for a while and if Nothing follows its typical July release schedule, it could hit shelves soon. According to Pei, the Phone 3 will also be the company’s first true AI phone.

In the video, the Nothing team shows some demos. It looks like a direct copy of OpenAI’s GPT-4o demo: a custom voice assistant built into the operating system. This is what all thinks it will be the future of the smartphone. The other demo shows a dynamic, personalized home screen that looks like a combination of an app launcher and news feed. It automatically captures and shows a QR code for a ticket you’ll need soon, pulls content from the web, and shows relevant reminders and weather. The idea, says Pei, is to think about how AI can transform smartphones into an app-centric model and a system that knows exactly what you need and where you are at all times.

Pei is careful to say that these are entirely new prototypes and that even tinkering with the home screen will take a while to happen. “You can’t just launch a new product and be like, ‘here, there are no more apps, are you going to buy it?’” he says in the video. “Of course they won’t buy it.” (I can’t prove that this is a criticism of Humane or Rabbit, but…it definitely is.) Pei says Nothing’s job is to build a bridge between current systems and the next. He also compares Nothing to Nintendo, in the sense that the job is not to compete on technology, but simply to make good, fun things.

It’s been a while since anything has been thinking clearly about AI: it integrated ChatGPT into recent headsets, and last year it The Vergecast, Pei told me he was already thinking about a world beyond apps. “We feel like apps have gotten very powerful,” he said then, “and with Phone 2, we’re trying to at least give users options to take back some of that power.” Last year this largely meant revamping the interface and giving users more notification controls, but now it seems to mean AI. “Maybe we could just tell the phone what we need to do,” he continued, “and it would use those apps for us without them being visible in the foreground.”

On the issue of smartphones: Pei has always said that the reason Nothing started building headphones and smartphones is because they are the gadgets that everyone actually uses now. “I think a computing device made from a big screen with some camera capability will be the dominant form factor for a long time,” he said last year. He believed that building phones was a safer, albeit more competitive, business, and Humane and Rabbit’s experience seems to prove him right. He has been hinting, though, that there could be a next big thing coming soon – now it looks like it could be the next big thing you already have. Just a little different.