OPINION: It’s a big year for artificial intelligence; not only are we seeing massive steps forward from Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT with ChatGPT 4o, and the terrifyingly accurate video that Sora can generate, but we’re now seeing that trickle down to smartphones in a meaningful way.
The exact integration depends a lot on your smartphone software and manufacturer. Samsung’s Galaxy AI toolkit allows you to do things like rewrite messages, transcribe and summarise voice recordings and translate in real time (even in phone calls).
Honor’s Magic Portal, on the other hand, focuses more on intent, allowing you to drag and drop content and let the phone figure out what you want to do with it, i.e. dragging an address onto the Uber icon will open the app and pre-program your destination.
Then there’s Apple, and the introduction of Apple Intelligence as part of iOS 18, due for release in the coming months. Though the integration is fairly exclusive at this point, set to be available for iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max users in the US, it offers impressive on-device smarts including a redesigned and wholly more capable Siri, the ability to transcribe phone calls, generate custom emoji and much more.
One of the key features of Apple Intelligence is its ability to integrate with other LLMs, and Apple has announced that ChatGPT will be the first of many to be available. It makes sense; ChatGPT is the most well-known chatbot around, and its capabilities are pretty impressive, especially if you pay for ChatGPT Plus.
Enter Nothing
But what if I were to tell you that there’s a smartphone operating system that already boasts OS-level integration with ChatGPT? Even better, it’s not exclusive to ridiculously expensive phones, instead available on phones that cost as little as £319.
Well, that’s very much the case with Nothing and Nothing OS, and it’s not even new. In fact, the ChatGPT integration came back in April 2024 as part of Nothing OS 2.5.5, and I can’t work out why it’s not getting the praise it rightfully deserves.
It works really well too; all you need to do is download the ChatGPT app from Google Play and log in with your account. From there, you can add ChatGPT widgets to your home screen for quick access to text, voice and even image search queries. It’s at this point that you’re likely pointing out that simply having a widget isn’t integration – and you’d be right.
When you tap on a regular ChatGPT widget on any other Android or iPhone, you’ll be taken to the ChatGPT app where you can initiate your search. On Nothing phones, however, this all happens directly on your home screen, with a minimalist overlay that appears on-screen to indicate that ChatGPT is active.
It’s a much cleaner, more streamlined way of using ChatGPT, and it essentially allowed me to ditch Google Gemini while I was testing out the Nothing Phone (2a) Plus ahead of its reveal this week. It’s the voice integration that really blew me away; being able to have a voice chat with ChatGPT from the Home screen was such a cool experience, allowing me to get access to information way faster than usual.
The ChatGPT widgets have also been completely redesigned to fit in with the dot-matrix styling of Nothing OS, just to make sure they blend seamlessly into the experience.
That’s not all either; Nothing has recently expanded its AI toolkit in a way I’ve not seen before with the News Reporter widget. It’s another feature I got to play with on the Nothing Phone (2a) Plus earlier this week, but it should be rolling out to the rest of the Nothing collection as we speak.
In its simplest form, the News Reporter widget uses AI to curate news across eight genres, including science, tech, sports and entertainment, and deliver the top news in a digestible format every morning. That might not sound that impressive, but it actually converts the text to audio, and uses Nothing’s CFO Tim Holbrow’s voice to do so.
That results in an impressively realistic newscasting experience, with the same natural pauses and intonations we see from newscasters on screen and on the air. If I wasn’t told that this was AI-powered, I’d have assumed that the audio clips are recorded every morning. That’s how good it sounds.
Again, this is all available on the entire Nothing collection, including the £319 Nothing Phone (2a). So yes, I really think Nothing’s ChatGPT integration, and approach to AI in general, need way more praise and attention. Well done, team Nothing.
