Nothing has released a new smartphone, the Phone (2a) Plus. It’s nearly identical to the Phone (2a) released earlier this year, with a few upgrades to its specs. It costs $399 and is available in the US through the same beta program. But what’s most intriguing to us isn’t the new Android phone, it’s the company’s new widgets.
The “News Reporter” widget, available by default on all Nothing and CMF smartphones, and on other Android and iOS devices via the Nothing X app, plays quick, artificial intelligence-summarized breaking news stories, read by a synthesized voice of the company’s chief financial officer, Tim Holbrough. (Nothing uses ElevenLabs technology for sound synthesis and output.) As soon as you tap on the widget, you’re greeted by a pleasant British voice.
“Welcome to Nothing News, where the only thing we take seriously is nothing. I’m Tim, your CFO and reluctant news reader. Today we create something out of nothing, because that’s literally what we do.”
The widget will start cycling through the news articles you select. You can add or remove categories of interest to you, such as business, entertainment, technology, sports, etc., by long pressing the widget and tapping (Edit). These news articles are summarized using Meta’s Llama large-scale language model and retrieved from “trusted English news sources” through the News API.
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You can skip articles by swiping down on the notification bar and hitting the next button on the media playback notification, at which point Holbro will add a quip: “Don’t like that article? Let’s find another one.” After I’d skipped quite a few articles in a row, the AI Holbro asked me, “Do you even like the news?”
The summaries are one minute each (approximately) and you can watch eight news stories per day. The widget updates every morning with new news. Unfortunately, and frustratingly, the widget doesn’t provide much useful information if you want to read further. It doesn’t say where the news came from or provide a link to read it directly from the source.
Every smartphone manufacturer is touting some kind of generative AI feature in their new products this year: Samsung has Galaxy AI, Google has the Gemini chatbot and plethora of AI features on its Pixel phones, Motorola recently announced Moto AI, and even OnePlus has teased some AI features on its phones, including an AI Eraser that can remove unwanted objects from photos. Nothing, which introduced ChatGPT integration on its earbuds earlier this year, marks its latest generative AI feature.
