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How many apps does it take to plan a work meeting or a dinner with friends? It likely involves bouncing between your text messaging app, an email app, a navigation app like Google Maps and perhaps a reservation app like Resy or Opentable.
Google wants to cut down on that back-and-forth with a tool coming to its newly announced Pixel 10 phones, announced on Wednesday and launching on August 28. The feature, called Magic Cue, uses artificial intelligence to analyze what you’re doing on your phone and suggest the next action.
The concept isn’t entirely new, and the tech isn’t advanced enough to handle sophisticated tasks. But it could set the stage for more dramatic alterations to how smartphones operate in the age of AI, a goal that Apple and other phone makers are also chasing. It could also give Google another way to differentiate its Pixel phones from the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy devices, both of which dominate the market for smartphones both in the United States and around the world.
“A lot of what (smartphones) are doing is actually helping to store information for us, but then it’s up to us to remember where we can find a specific document, or an email or an appointment that we’re looking for,” Tyler Kugler, a group product manager leading the Pixel AI team at Google, said in a press briefing ahead of Wednesday’s event. “And that whole process can end up being deceptively tedious.”
Magic Cue uses Google’s Gemini Nano AI model and the company’s Tensor G5, the chip inside Google’s new phones, to process what a person is doing on their device in real time. It’ll then offer suggestions, such as a button to call a restaurant within a text message thread asking about dinner reservations. Computing happens locally on the device rather than being sent to the cloud, Google says, which is generally considered to be more private, because data does not need to leave a person’s device.
In one demo viewed by CNN, a button labeled “Call United” appears right below a text message asking the recipient to call the airline to change their flight. The goal is to speed up the process by removing the need to look up the right phone number and switch to the phone app. Google will also display flight details in the phone app during the call.
In another demo, Google surfaced the address for a restaurant when receiving a text message asking where the reservation was. The company said Magic Cue will work for specific use cases like settling a restaurant tab, adding events to one’s calendar and previewing weather forecasts for an upcoming trip, with more capabilities rolling out over time.
In addition to those examples, the tech will be incorporated into Google’s Daily Hub, which is a section of the phone’s interface that shows things like upcoming calendar events and suggested playlists. In the Daily Hub, Magic Cue will show tidbits like reservations or reminders to return an online order.
Google hopes the feature will make its smartphones easier to navigate by preventing consumers from juggling multiple apps to accomplish a single task. But there’s also evidence to suggest that people are changing their behavior on their own: US smartphone owners are using fewer apps, according to a 2022 eMarketer report. Meanwhile, overall time spent on smartphones was up, indicating people are dedicating their screen time to a relatively small pool of apps.
Still, tech giants believe there’s a need to make it easier to get things done without having to switch apps, and Google’s new feature marks the latest example.
Apple’s Siri Suggestions can make recommendations based on your routines, such as suggesting who to add to a calendar invite or email based on previous activity. Based on the company’s demo, Google’s Magic Cue seems to go a step beyond Apple’s feature by making it easier to take a specific action, like calling an airline or restaurant, by analyzing the content on your phone. Apple is expected to release a new version of Siri that can handle tasks within apps for users next year after delaying a major update to its popular virtual assistant.
Samsung is taking a similar approach, too. In January, it highlighted the ability to use Google’s Gemini assistant to take actions across apps as being one of the Galaxy S25’s hallmark features.
A shift to using AI to handle tasks would be similar to how the internet worked before mobile devices, when consumers used one central application, like a web browser, to accomplish tasks versus using separate apps, said Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst for research firm Creative Strategies.
“And so instead of going to one place, we went to many places. And now it feels like we’re going back to that one place, but, you know, a much more capable place, which would be your preferred, AI agent,” she said.
But Google will likely need more than new AI features like these to boost its hardware presence in the smartphone industry. Market research firms that track global smartphone shipments, such as The International Data Corporation (IDC), Counterpoint Research and Canalys, don’t even break out Google in their metrics because it has such a small share. Nabila Popal, a senior director with the IDC’s data and analytics team, told CNN via email that Google’s Pixel phones account for only 1% of the global smartphone market as of the second quarter of 2025.
Smartphone makers have been pushing to incorporate more AI into their devices over the past two years. But shoppers typically upgrade their phones out of necessity rather than a desire for new features, according to Josh Lowitz, an analyst with Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which tracks consumer habits in the United States.
The firm’s data indicates 68% of American shoppers upgrade their phone because it needed replacing – either because the battery life is too short or the screen was cracked, for example.
Google’s new Pixel phones should offer improvements in some of these core areas too, the company claims, by offering longer battery life, camera upgrades such as an AI-powered feature to help with framing shots and compatibility with accessories like wireless chargers that can snap to the back of the device similar to Apple’s MagSafe charging system.
The Pixel 10’s AI features might not convince shoppers to run out and get a new phone. But Popal sees it as being a step towards broader changes to the way consumers use mobile devices.
“I do too see a future without apps, where the AI is the driving operating system and the user does not need to switch between apps to perform tasks,” she said over email. “I still see the smartphone as the computing device for consumers to use AI, but how we use it will change.”
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