Nothing new about a smartphone: the Telephone (2a) Plus—almost identical to the Phone (2a) that launched earlier this year, but with slightly improved specs. It costs $399 and is available in the US through the same beta program. But it’s not the new Android phone that we find most interesting, but the company’s new widget.
The “News Reporter” widget, available by default on all Nothing and CMF smartphones, as well as other Android and iOS devices via Nothing X Appallows you to quickly reproduce a news bulletin summarized by artificial intelligence. It is read by the synthesized voice of Tim Holbrowthe company’s CFO. (Nothing uses ElevenLabs technology for sound synthesis and production.) As soon as you tap the widget, you’re greeted by a soothing British voice:
“Welcome to Nothing News, where the only thing we’re serious about is not taking anything seriously. I’m Tim, your CFO and reluctant news reader. Today, we’re creating something out of nothing, because that’s literally our job.”
The widget will begin displaying a selection of news stories – you can long press the widget and tap Edit to add or remove categories that interest you, such as business, entertainment, technology, and sports. These stories are pulled from “trusted English language news sources” via News APIusing Meta’s large Llama language models for summarization.
You can swipe down the notification bar and press the next button on the media playback notification to skip a story, to which Holbrow will add a quip. “Don’t like that one? Let’s find another one.” After I skipped a few in a row, AI Holbrow asked me, “Do you like news?”
The digests last a minute each (approximately) and you get eight stories per day. Every morning, the widget is updated with a new batch. Sadly, and frustratingly, the widget doesn’t offer much information if you want to read more. There’s no indication of where the news was pulled from and no links are provided to read directly from the source.
Every smartphone company has been touting some sort of generative AI feature in its new devices this year. Samsung has Galaxy AI; Google has its Gemini chatbot and a host of AI features in Pixel phones; Motorola recently introduced Moto AI; and even OnePlus has been hinting at some AI Features on their phones, such as AI Eraser, which lets you remove unwanted objects from photos. Nothing introduced a ChatGPT integration to its headphones earlier this year, and this widget is the latest generative AI feature to arrive.