Afriend texted to ask when I would arrive in New Orleans for her wedding. My phone immediately pulled my flight itinerary from an email to respond to her with the arrival time.

Another friend recommended that I check out an Ethiopian restaurant nearby. My phone instantly loaded a map showing where it was.

And when I took a photo of my corgi Max, my phone coached me to take a better one by framing him in the bottom-right corner.

The phone that did all this was Google’s new $1,000 (nearly ₹89,000) Pixel 10 Pro. Google describes the device as an artificially intelligent phone, a new kind of smartphone that requires persistent access to users’ personal data, including their contacts, location, messages and email, to anticipate their needs. In other words, it’s a phone that essentially uses people’s apps to save them time.

But is this what people really want? I pondered this question as I tested the Pixel phone over the last week, surrendering my data to Google’s AI in exchange for some help.

Here’s how my week testing Google’s AI phone went.

Magic Cue

At the heart of the artificially intelligent Pixel is a new software tool called Magic Cue, which Google designed to anticipate your needs on the phone. Alex Moriconi, a Google spokesperson, said Magic Cue runs on the Pixel phone’s hardware. That means the data you share with it for help with various tasks is not scanned or processed on Google’s servers.

To set it up, you grant the software access to apps including email, messages, notes, contacts, calendar and screenshots. In exchange, you can streamline tasks such as:

— When you receive a text asking for a friend’s phone number, the software will read that message and dig through your contacts to generate an automatic response with that person’s digits

— When you place a phone call to a business, such as an airline, the software will pull up relevant information from your flight itinerary so you can read it to the airline’s support representative

— If you create a calendar event for a hike on the weekend, the weather app will show the forecast for the location of the excursion.

In my tests, Magic Cue was hit or miss.

In some instances, like receiving a text message asking for a friend’s phone number, Magic Cue pulled up the correct answer.

In other situations, it failed. When I called United Airlines to talk about my flight to New Orleans, the software tried loading a confirmation number from my itinerary. But Magic Cue showed a string of numbers — 138826 — that referred to the amount I had spent on the airfare: $1,388.26.

Here’s the bigger problem. I tapped a small arrow button to see where Magic Cue was finding these numbers. It pulled them from an email from Monarch, a personal finance service that I use to track my expenses, not from my United Airlines itinerary. In other words, Magic Cue scanned an email related to my finances.

It was a reminder of how invasive data sharing can be.

Camera Assistant

Google added software to the new Pixel to help people take and edit better photos. One feature is Camera Coach that studies what you are photographing to give step-by-step advice to compose a better shot.

A feature that people may find more useful is a photo- editing tool that lets them make complex changes to an image by simply typing in a prompt. In a photo I took of a beef entree at a Vietnamese restaurant, I asked the AI to remove a hand from the image. Within seconds, it removed the hand and replaced it with artificial imagery of the dinner table.

The Big Picture

AI phones like the Pixel could redefine the social contract for what we get in exchange for what we give up in our personal technology.

In the past, the give and take felt reciprocal. To use a maps app for directions, you had to share your location, for example. But with an AI phone, we are sharing a whole lot about ourselves just to speed up a few tasks.

This future is far from inevitable. It is up to consumers to decide whether to use these tools and weigh the benefits. For me, an AI phone needs to be far more reliable and helpful before I would make the leap.

NYTNS