Robert Triggs / Android Authority
You unlock your phone and bam, you’re greeted by an AI widget showing you the weather. Utter “Ok Google,” and there’s Gemini, ready to chat with you in whatever language you speak. Make a circular gesture on your screen, and voila, you’ve got information on whatever you were just staring at in wonder.
We’re surrounded by AI tools, so much so that we often stumble into them without even meaning to. So instead of resisting AI, I’ve been leaning into it — and how! In a recent experiment, I couldn’t even survive a few days without my favorite AI tools.
Here are the ones I actually use and can’t live without, followed by a few that show up here and there but are honestly better off staying turned off.
How often do you use AI on your Android phone?
305 votes
Daily
29%
A few times a week
26%
Rarely
26%
Never
19%
Let’s start with the good stuff:
Circle to Search
C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
You’d easily make it to my favorite-people list if you remember Google Now on Tap. Circle to Search is basically a makeover of that: a smarter, AI-powered version that can still read your screen, but with more flair. And if you’ve got a phone with a stylus, it’s even better — it feels way bossier.
I just long-press the home bar and circle whatever image or text I’m looking at, and Google looks it up for me. Simple. That’s the kind of smart, frictionless tool that makes you want to use AI, not one that force-feeds it to you. It’s now one of my favorite additions to Android in recent times.
Voice typing in Gboard
Andy Walker / Android Authority
I’m a typer — in case my profession didn’t already give it away. But that’s with a real keyboard, the kind my ten fingers can glide over. Typing long messages with your thumbs might’ve looked cool in the BlackBerry era, but tapping on a glass screen doesn’t exactly qualify as ‘typing’ in my book.
That’s why I sooo prefer voice typing. And no tool does it better than Gboard. It not only understands the peculiar ways I pronounce certain words in my Indian accent, but it also nails other languages I speak with surprisingly good accuracy. In English, it lets me go back, add emoji, punctuate, fix mistakes — all with voice commands, it helpfully guides me through. Honestly, it doesn’t get better than this.
Recorder
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Pixel Recorder
When I’m attending events or interviewing executives, I don’t bother with a fancy recording device anymore. My Pixel handles it all, and better. Audio quality has never let me down, but it’s the live transcription that I’m a big fan of. It’s like real-life subtitles, super useful when someone’s speaking with an accent I can’t follow.
Conversations here can slip between two or more languages, and Google handles that effortlessly, too. And the best part is that I don’t have to sit through a 50-minute recording when I get home. I just search the transcript for what I need, then toss it into Gemini to pull out summaries or key points.
Magic Editor
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
Reimagine in Magic Editor
Magic Editor in Google Photos has moved way past being just an eraser tool; it’s powerful enough to make you question what a photograph even is anymore. But when it comes to personal photos, I prefer not to get too philosophical. Sometimes, I just want the best version of a photo for Instagram.
And this tool makes that possible for people like me who have never touched Photoshop. It’s helped me rescue so many pictures where my expression was perfect (such a rare thing!), but something random in the background was killing the vibe. Magic Editor steps in like a seasoned ER doc to save that rare photo.
You can even move things around completely, but I find that a bit much. I usually stick to more minor cleanups with generative fill, so my amateur edits don’t end up looking like a smudgy Photoshop job from 2009.
Now, the ones I despise with all my heart:
AI wallpaper generation
C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
AI imagery already feels nauseating enough with its artifacts and weird errors, so why would I want to stare at that mess all day? Google, Samsung, Nothing — everyone’s trying to inject AI into every app they can think of, and these AI wallpaper apps are just unnecessary. They waste compute, and frankly, feel like a slap in the face to real artists, whether photographers or abstract wallpaper designers.
I’d rather have a carefully chosen wallpaper that clicks with me than some AI slop manufactured by a magic wand in 10 seconds.
AI weather summaries
Joe Maring / Android Authority
I get the point of weather alerts in notifications; they are quick, glanceable strings of text. But when I open the actual weather app, I don’t want to see long, jumbled-up sentences. I want cold, hard data — all visualized.
Our brains are already trained to quickly scan numbers, icons, and charts to get a sense of what the day or week looks like. That’s way faster than reading some cute (read: wasted) sentence telling me “It’s a good day to carry an umbrella.” No kidding — it’s raining. If Google ever removes these summaries from Pixel devices, I won’t be the one mourning.
AI article summaries
Joe Maring / Android Authority
I know it’s starting to sound like I have a grudge against summaries. But hear me out.
You can ask Gemini to summarize an open Chrome tab, and it’ll give you a neat little gist. It’s helpful when you’re in a hurry, but it strips out so much nuance. Summarizing this very piece, for example, would just give you a list of tools I like and dislike. But it wouldn’t capture the why or how strongly I feel about those reasons.
If you’re not someone who enjoys reading, you probably won’t mind. But for those of us who have a thing for words, these summaries feel like betrayal. I can’t get a peek into the writer’s mind — something AI can’t do for me.
So, did you spot the pattern? The AI features I don’t like are the ones that try too hard to be part of my workflow. I can smell their desperation, and I run the other way. But the ones that are actually useful? They slip into your life so naturally that you barely notice them until you try to live without them.
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