Thoughtful use of AI: underdog shows the big brands how it's done

It’s been almost two years since “AI” started taking over all the tech talk spaces. As soon as ChatGPT was introduced in late 2022, it kind of blew our minds, huge segments of the industry got turned upside down, smartphones included. Soon after, every manufacturer — big and small — was looking for ways to incorporate some sort of AI tool into their user interface.

Now, in 2025, a lot of us tech fans are kind of tired of hearing about it. Smartphones have full AI suites, capable of generating badly-looking images, summarize our notifications in incoherent ways, compose our text messages and emails to make us look even more lazy and jaded than we are, and not to mention all the apps in the app stores that claim they now “have AI”.

To this day, in most smartphones, I find two features useful. One is summarizing long articles — and even then, some AIs do better (shout out Galaxy) than others. The second thing I use it for is… well, search, since googling something has become quite the ordeal. Do you think that maybe the strategy is to sabotage Google search, so that people use Gemini more? Hm, food for another discussion, I guess.

In comes Nothing with its “less is more” approach

While I am not a regular Nothing Phone user (release a new flagship already, please!), I’ve been following along with Nothing UI’s developments and its adoption of AI. And, thus far, it has been very modest and careful with new “smart” features.

Granted, this could be because it’s a startup company that doesn’t have the resources to throw all the spaghetti at the wall.

But even then, when looking at the features, they do follow Nothing’s company mission pretty closely — to seamlessly integrate digital features into our real everyday lives.

What does Nothing AI do?

Currently, two things:

• News Reporter:

Released last year, the News Reporter widget will summarize the major headlines in categories you pick. It will then read it out for you in a voice modeled after Nothing’s CFO — Tim Holbrow. That, in itself, is a pretty cool touch, making you as a user feel closer to the company, with one of its bigwigs giving you your daily briefing starting with “Hey, I’m Tim”, followed by a joke.



If you are curious, you can try the News Reporter widget on any Android phone or iPhone — you need to install the Nothing X app. Then, place the widget (it looks like a circle made up of lines) on your homescreen to begin setting it up. It does require a Nothing account, while a Nothing Phone will not ask for something of the sort, weirdly.

• Essential Space:

This is the new app, launched with the new Nothing Phone (3a) series. It’s basically a riff on Google’s new Screenshots app, but with more tacked onto it. Press the essential key and you take a screenshot, or hold the Essential Key and you can take a screenshot and record a voice note with it.

This all goes into the Essential Space, where the AI sorts the information, extracts keywords for easier searching, and even generates automatic notifications if it detects that you’ve screenshotted something important or time-sensitive.



Its use case is pretty evident — it’s here to help you sort and sift through multiple pages of research. You can screenshot a notification to remember it later, a website, an event poster, a Maps address, and so on.

At the time of writing this, Nothing has updated the Essential Space to use the camera, so you can take a photo of something instead of a screenshot, and it will act much the same. In the future, it will also be able to record meetings and use AI to transcribe and keyword them in the same manner — we’ve seen that in other AI suites.

Two for two, Nothing

I can very much see myself relying on the Essential Space often, as I do a lot of research online, and a lot of it through a phone or tablet in my hands.

I also used the News Reporter widget last year while I was using the Phone (2a) as my daily carry. It’s also pretty neat, though I wouldn’t mind some expanding on it. The summaries are pretty short, there are no sources and no ways to click for the full articles. I’d appreciate it if that was implemented, and I’m pretty sure the sources would appreciate the traffic.

But my point is that while I was skeptical of the marketing promises of “user experience at the core”, Nothing Phones are slowly starting to show that they do, carefully integrating new and useful features, instead of blindly copying.

And I do believe that such care and experimentation deserve to be acknowledged. Lest we all become jaded consumers of the same smartphone features over and over again!

• Bonus: first to ChatGPT integration

Before Apple bowed out of the race and just integrated ChatGPT into iOS 18, Nothing already had a way for you to talk with the AI directly. If you own a Nothing phone (or CMF by Nothing phone) and any contemporary Nothing Ear buds, you could set them up to activate a chat with ChatGPT instead of Google Assistant. Just a fun factoid!