With the Pad 3 arriving next week, OnePlus have announced OnePlus AI which will be coming first to the….OnePlus 13s, the upcoming smaller handset that’s coming to India only. The rest of the world will have to wait until later in the year for the AI features to be pushed out to the rest of the 13-series.
Branded “Intelligently Yours”, the heart of the AI is Plus Mind, “a new feature designed to quickly save, catalog and recall key information found on the screen” before AI tools analyse the content for data. The way it works is this: when you find something that you want to keep, you can ask AI Plus Mind to save the on-screen information to a dedicated Mind Space for future reference and analysis. At face value, it doesn’t look terrible dissimilar from other scrapbook apps but bear in mind that it’s a stored copy rather than a link to another website.
Once the information has been captured, AI Plus Mind will review and analyse the content to understand the data. The press release mentions extracting schedule details and adding them to the calendar but hopefully it will be able to handle addresses and other semi-structured data. AI Search is integrated as well so you’ll be able to make natural language queries about the information stored in the Mind Space.
In addition to the core of AI Plus Mind, OnePlus is developing a suite of AI apps to assist with transcription and translation, plus photo editing and composition tools. AI Best Face will be able to create the perfect group photo, eliminating closed eyes and “sub-optimal expressions“. I think that’s people not smiling between you and me
That’s broadly the good news. The bad news is that the ubiquitous OnePlus Alert Slider is being replaced by the OnePlus Plus Key, a customisable button which can change sound profiles, take a picture, start a recording or….launch AI Plus Mind. I’ll reserve judgement until I see it in action but the whole benefit of the the Alert Slider was that it did one thing and did it well. You could discretely silence your phone without a whole rigmarole of turning the phone on, unlocking it, finding the sound profiles and choosing the quiet one. Couldn’t we have both?
Further, OnePlus is extending Gemini’s influence into the standard OnePlus apps such as Clock and Notes, improving the overall AI experience.
OnePlus is keen to highlight that as much processing as possible is done on the handset itself, but when additional resources are needed, the AI can engage the company’s Private Computing Cloud which provides a secure, encrypted environment for data processing.
Personally I’m still looking for uses for AI at a personal level, beyond removing strangers from my photos, so this sounds promising.