Best AI smartphones 2024

What is an AI smartphone?

Although Artificial Intelligence has been around for over 60 years, it has recently become a real buzzword—especially with the launch of platforms such as ChatGPT. But what is an AI smartphone?

Put simply, an AI smartphone is a phone that uses artificial intelligence in some of its features. This can incorporate machine learning and large language models, with AI onboard, outsourced to the cloud, or a mix of both. It’s a broad definition, but it needs to be – with AI infiltrating almost every aspect of our digital lives, from writing emails to putting together presentations and taking photos. It won’t be long before every half-decent phone uses AI in some form. We’ll soon wonder how we ever did without it.

How do smartphones use AI?

Writing

Artificial intelligence can help you compose all sorts of texts, from emails and summaries to full reports, presentations and white papers. It can also help you edit text – just tell it to add more dynamic words to your CV, and the job’s yours, we imagine.

Photo editing

This is a really big one. While basic photo editing functions have been simple to do on phones for a while now, the really serious stuff has required specialist software, years of expertise and a powerful computer. Not anymore. The barrier to entry just got lowered.

Image generation

To really see what AI can do, try generating images. Just give it a description of what you want to see, and it will put it into visuals. AI-compatible iPhones can even create cartoonish characters (called Genmoji) using photos of people.

Discovering the world

Point your phone at your surroundings, and it can throw up all sorts of information about landmarks, local customs, local geography and history and more. Iterations of this have been possible since Google launched Google Goggles back in 2010 (the precursor to Google Lens), but AI supercharges it.

Illustrating

Dash off a rough sketch, and AI can fine-tune it into a professional-level illustration. You don’t even have to draw anything – AI can take text in a note and create an illustration based on the context to help add a visual element to your thinking. No talent? No problem.

Prioritise and focus

AI can bring urgent emails to the top of your inbox and create summaries for you to read without even opening the message. It can also suggest quick replies and analyse questions within messages to ensure that you have answered every query asked of you. And it can quieten all notifications, except urgent ones, to help you concentrate on the task at hand.

Smarter assistants

Virtual assistants like Google Assistant and Siri are much more natural-sounding and helpful with AI. They can also understand context from one request to the next, so you don’t have to keep repeating obvious details.

Search with gestures

Circle to Search is a neat feature that lets you Google anything you draw a circle around. On compatible phones, you can do this with your finger or a stylus.

Is there a difference between the use of AI and generative AI in smartphones?

There is. Standard AI relies on specific rules to solve problems, while generative AI is used for creating new content. For example, standard AI can summarise text and answer queries by quickly analysing lots of source content, whereas generative AI is concerned with more creative tasks – these include improving photos by meshing together the best elements of lots of different shots of the same scene, replying in a suitable tone depending on the request, and customising the gaming experience to your abilities with adaptive learning curves and dynamic storytelling.

The top 10 AI smartphones in 2025

1 - Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max