Nothing Cellphone (2a) Plus With AI Information Widget: Specs, Costs, Availability

Nothing has a new smartphone—the Phone (2a) Plus—almost equivalent to the Phone (2a) it launched earlier this 12 months, however with barely beefed-up specs. It prices $399 and is out there within the US by the identical beta program. However it is not the brand new Android handset we discover most fascinating, it is the corporate’s new widget.

The “Information Reporter” widget, accessible by default on all Nothing and CMF smartphones plus different Android and iOS gadgets by way of the Nothing X app, enables you to shortly play a information bulletin summarized by synthetic intelligence. It’s learn out by the synthesized voice of Tim Holbrow, the corporate’s chief monetary officer. (Nothing is utilizing ElevenLabs’ tech for sound synthesis and output.) As quickly as you faucet the widget, you are greeted by a soothing British voice:

“Welcome to Nothing Information, the place the one factor we take significantly is just not taking something significantly. I am Tim, your CFO and reluctant information reader. Right this moment, we’re making one thing out of nothing, as a result of that is actually our job.”

The widget will begin biking by a collection of information tales—you possibly can press and maintain the widget and faucet Edit so as to add or take away classes you are interested by, reminiscent of enterprise, leisure, tech, and sports activities. These information tales are pulled from “trusted English-language information sources” by News API, utilizing Meta’s Llama large language models for the summarization.

You possibly can swipe down the notification bar and press the following button on the media playback notification to skip a narrative, to which Holbrow will add a quip. “Not feeling that one? Let’s discover one other.” After I skipped fairly a number of in a row, AI Holbrow requested, “Do you even like information?”

The summaries are one minute every (roughly), and also you get eight tales per day. Each morning, the widget will refresh with a recent batch. Sadly, and frustratingly, the widget does not provide you with a lot to go on if you wish to learn extra. There is not any attribution to the place it pulled the information from, and no hyperlinks are offered to learn straight from the supply.

Each smartphone firm has been touting some sort of generative AI characteristic in new gadgets this 12 months. Samsung has Galaxy AI; Google has its Gemini chatbot and a bevy of AI options in Pixel phones; Motorola launched Moto AI recently; and even OnePlus has been teasing a number of AI features in its telephones, like AI Eraser, which helps you to take away undesirable objects from photographs. Nothing launched a ChatGPT integration in its earbuds earlier this 12 months, and this widget is the newest generative AI characteristic to land.