AI is taking the tech world by storm, but AI itself is more than just a chatbot. AI features are being built into all different kinds of tech, from the devices like your phone that you use every day, to the apps that you’ve been using for years, to new websites that will supercharge your productivity.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a host of new devices and products that put AI front and center. Some of them, of course, are pretty lame – but others are smart, and just downright cool. Of course, some are also pretty useless, and border on being a scam. Here’s a look at some of the most fun AI products we’ve seen so far this year.
Samsung is building AI features into its phones in some pretty smart ways. Samsung’s suite of AI features is called “Galaxy AI,” and there are plenty of features that make Galaxy AI genuinely useful. Notably, Galaxy AI includes the much-loved “Circle to Search” feature, which allows users to circle an object on their screen to search it with Google. It’s commonly used to find products like clothing, and is pretty accurate. Other features include the ability to edit photos by removing unwanted objects and moving objects within a scene, then having the phone generate parts of the image to replace those objects. It even has real-time translation features built into the phone app.
What if you could always communicate with ChatGPT, without even having to pull your phone out of your pocket? That’s the concept behind Solos, a new pair of smart glasses that have speakers and microphones built into them, and let you chat directly with SolosChat (powered by ChatGPT) using your voice. They support additional features too, like SolosTranslate, which is another real-time translation feature. And, they don’t look out of place like many other smart glasses – they look like normal glasses, with a slightly thicker arm.
Microsoft is taking AI very seriously. In fact, the company has announced a new generation of PCs that support a range of new AI features. These new PCs are powered by powerful new AI accelerator chips, also called NPUs, that can process AI features locally, without having to send data back to the cloud. Features on Copilot+ PCs include Recall, which allows users to ask about websites, files, and other things that they might have done on their PC weeks ago, and Cocreate, in which users can sketch out a drawing, and combine that drawing with descriptive text to create a much more professional-looking image.
Google, of course, is embracing AI too – and while tools like Gemini are cool, MusicFX is a much more fun example of Google’s AI features. MusicFX is a music generator that lets you create a new track by simply typing a description of what the music should sound like. The tool, which is part of Google’s AI Test Kitchen, actually produces some pretty interesting music, and allows you to control settings like the duration of a track, whether it loops or not, and more. Best of all, MusicFX comes with a DJ mode, which allows the user to create a continuous, customizable AI music experience.
You can create videos with Viggle.AI as easily as creating music in MusicFX. Viggle.AI is built around creating fun animated characters – which can be done through, for example, uploading an image of a character and describing how you want them animated, or even combining a static image and a video of a dance to have the character from the image dance like the one in the video. It’s a pretty cool implementation of AI – and seriously brings more into the AI conversation.
