- General
- October 10, 2018
- 5 minutes read
Android creator Andy Rubin’s Essential said to be working on new AI phone
The Essential Phone released last year met lower than expected sales and failed to take off with consumer interest image…
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| The Essential Phone released last year met lower than expected sales and failed to take off with consumer interest
image : Essential
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Essential Products, The Palo Alto based consumer electronics startup founded by Android creator Andy Rubin has now been reported to developing a new kind of phone that will try to mimic the user and automatically respond to messages on their behalf in order to differentiate itself in the smartphone market dominated by Apple and Samsung.
The new report comes from Bloomberg which states of Essential having put most projects aside to focus on this new development after its first product, The Essential Phone failed to take off to consumer interest.
The new device is reported to be designed with a small screen and requirement of users to interact mainly using voice commands through Essential’s AI software. The idea of the product is to book appointments or respond to text messages and e-mails on its own as per the Bloomberg report.
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| Essential Founder Andy Rubin
image : Joi Ito on Flickr
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In an interview with Bloomberg last year, Rubin who oversaw the development of the Android operating system and also previously led the robotics division at Google hinted at a similar idea.
“If I can get to the point where your phone is a virtual version of you, you can be off enjoying your life, having that dinner, without touching your phone, and you can trust your phone to do things on your behalf,” Rubin stated. “I think I can solve part of the addictive behavior.”
Although such a concept comes as pretty marveling, It will have to take on so many practical challenges to get on such a level of sophistication with conventional offerings from virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa or the Google Assistant being quite limited although improvements are being made everyday.
Essential which was established in 2015 is backed by about $300 million raised from the likes of Amazon, Tencent and Google and is already a unicorn after the huge round closed last year.
