How Google’s Pixel 9 Pro Will Change Smartphones Forever

Next week, the Pixel 9 family of smartphones will be unveiled at its eponymous Made By Google event. The annual event allows Google to show what it thinks a smartphone should represent. Last year’s Pixel 8 family offered new displays, improved cameras, updated software, and a custom-designed Tensor Mobile chipset.

All of these changes allowed Google to promote the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro as AI-first smartphones, defining how generative AI would be introduced to the mobile world in the process. A year later, with this view of the market becoming the norm, Google can build on that success, solidifying its view of smartphone AI and controlling a key high level of AI.

This week, Google has the opportunity to do it again, but this time it’s not about defining a market, but strengthening it.

Google has a few AI tools that the Pixel platform has demonstrated, and similar tools are available from several Android manufacturers. You have tools to remove, move, or edit individual elements of a photo; you have the ability to transfer expressions between photos to get the best composite image possible; and you also have tools to clean up audio recorded in a video.

You have tools to transcribe audio, summarize information from web pages and emails, and search based on a screenshot or even a highlighted part of the screen. AI can help filter spam calls, act as a translator while traveling, and suggest replies, topics, and more as you compose on your phone.

All of these features debuted on the Pixel 8 family before spreading throughout the ecosystem. In fact, Google’s Circle to Search feature debuted on Samsung’s Galaxy AI platform, which mirrored many of the Pixel’s features and added many of its own. Other manufacturers introduced their own AI tools, and chipmakers ensured that support for AI routines was built into the AI ​​code.

All of these solutions followed the same vein and ethos that Google publicly showed with the Pixel 8. That direction will only be underscored this week with the launch of the Pixel 9 and a slew of new AI features.

There is another aspect of the competition related to the rise of genre-defining AI in Android. Apple is nowhere to be seen.

Google’s Pixel launch came two weeks after the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. Apple’s September launch didn’t include generative AI or any new areas it was supposed to explore. You could say the iPhone 15 family was the last of the big smartphone mainstays to launch without AI. Apple’s first opportunity to talk about AI for the iPhone didn’t come until its Worldwide Developer Conference in June.

The vaguely named Apple Intelligence software won’t be available immediately; it will have to wait for the September launch of the iPhone 16 family. It won’t be ported to any existing iPhone (aside from the 2023 iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max). Apple Intelligence also won’t be ready for the iPhone 16’s September 2024 launch. A limited set of tools will be included in the October iOS update, a basic implementation of ChatGPT by the end of the year, and the full suite shown off at WWDC won’t arrive until the first half of 2024.

Apple still has to catch up with the first generation of AI smartphones,

Meanwhile, Google is pushing Android with a second generation of AI smartphones ready to be unveiled to the public. Google is the company that will decide the future direction of AI.

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