Your phone's AI has grown up, and you didn't even know it

Summary

AI is becoming less flashy and more useful, from phones that understand our rambling to voice assistants that speak more naturally. The next phase of AI may be about making everyday life easier.

Hello, and welcome to Transformer.

Some of you who have read Mint may recall a technology newsletter that we ran for the last three months of 2025. In end-2025, Transformer began as a platform we wanted to experiment with to bring the best of our award-winning original technology reportage closer to you.

Transformer ran until the end of 2025, and found steady readership. At the start of the year, we took a hiatus, to see how our newsletter can evolve to keep pace with technology. Somehow, a simple wrap of our reporting did not seem to do justice -- especially at a time when, more than anything, we firmly believe that what holds true value is a well-researched opinion to cut through a whole load of AI clutter.

With that in mind, here's reintroducing Transformer.

Why the name? Two fundamental reasons.

One, when electricity was invented, it was the step-down transformer that made electricity viable for use in every household. In a way, the humble transformer, notorious for failing and combusting, is the mother of all invention. Without it, had we not learnt to tame electricity, no personal computer, cellphone or any other kind of gadget may have existed.

The second reason is more recent. In 2017, a team of Google-funded researchers published a research paper on a new kind of learning algorithm, in a paper called Attention Is All You Need. This was the very foundation of the transformer model -- the 'T' in ChatGPT, which you use perhaps almost everyday now.

In many ways, the transformer model changed the world as we knew it, since ChatGPT became a household name since end-2022. Four years since, generative AI is everywhere, and AI has become entrenched in everything -- from dining room debates to boardroom debacles.

Transformer by Mint is our effort to chronicle AI from the view of a rapidly changing world, especially through the lens of the world's most populous democracy.

Today, India is making tall strides in making its own semiconductor fabs, and seeing a quarter of a trillion dollars being committed to build data centres all across the country. At the heart of it all sits AI, and through Transformer, we hope to document the shifting tides.

Welcome to the ride, where Mint brings to you the best and worst of AI in corporate India, and its myriad policies and idiosyncrasies. I hope you'll have as much fun as I do.

Rambler arrives

About a month and a half ago, Google lent Mint a unit of its latest smartphone, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold. It's a fine phone, but it didn't need sharp eyes to see that it wasn't quite a generational jump in engineering -- Google's fourth edition of the foldable smartphone has remained rather similar for three years now.

On one fine pre-autumn evening, just as I was tinkering with the phone to find out what's new, I stumbled upon a new feature -- 'Rambler'.

Long story short, Rambler does exactly what it says -- it allows you to 'ramble' a few things, which Google's underlying AI algorithms can then sort out into a cohesive string of words. Why is it worth writing about? Because, it appears to be the start of a time when the idea of having AI features on an everyday computing device starts making sense.

More often than not, we find ourselves wondering about a certain place that we heard about in passing at a gathering, or a book that someone recommended fervently. We don't quite recall it, for the human memory is anything but a clean structure of it and bytes. This, exactly, is what Rambler solves: it allows you to 'ramble' about "some book on the history of the Vikings, which sounds similar in rhyme to A Song of Ice and Fire."

PSA: The book is called Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price.

In many ways, I may not have quite gotten around to searching with this exact string of words, for internet search -- at least for those of us who grew up before Sergey Brin and Larry Page changed the world with PageRank -- had to be formally accurate and organized to get the best results.

Today, that's no longer necessary -- you can even ramble in a mix of English and Hindi, and your keyboard does the rest for you.

As you start living with it, you realize that this isn't a one-off feature that's somewhat fun to use -- which is what AI on phones has felt like so far, for the most part. On the Pixel 11 Pro lineup, there are at least three such features -- Rambler, Teleprompter (in video camera settings) and Magic Capture (in still photography) -- which make themselves feel like you need them in your everyday life in general, depending on what you do, of course.

This came by at a time when Apple, after two years of first mentioning it, finally managed to make some progress with a better Siri experience. The new Siri isn't just an app or a bubble -- in many ways, it is finally usable.

But crucially, what all of these features mean today is that in some ways, AI is becoming less flashy, more demure, and eventually, more meaningful.

After at least two years of debates around how AI in smartphones is rather useless, Google (and in some parts, Apple) have made progress to actually make AI meaningfully relevant in our everyday lives.

For any technology, the benchmark of its success lies in how it makes our everyday conflicts easier. That, exactly, is what the 2026 bunch of flagship smartphones appear to be making.

Finally, speakers that actually converse

It's not just smartphones that are showing maturity, to be honest. On 16 September, Amazon brought its generative AI-powered voice interface, Alexa+, to India. Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is perhaps the sole voice interface around the world that found popularity, and now, much like Google's 'Rambler', can understand your language more naturally -- almost as if it were human.

Elsewhere, Sonos, the premium US-born audio-maker, launched Sonos 27 -- an audio operating system that uses AI at its core for audio sensing and distribution.

The idea, in all of these features, is simple: you live the way you normally would, and AI will find a way to make your life easier. While this theory is one of the very basic tenets of innovation, it is now that we're finally to see it take shape in the generative AI world.

The question now is, what next, and where stands India in all of this?

To be honest, that is one space where India has a long, long way to go. On 15 July, Mint wrote about how India's two well-funded AI startups, Sarvam and the non-profit BharatGen, projected that while the cheapest US AI model would cost nearly ₹200 to generate a response to a query (yes, generative AI is still that expensive), India is looking for a way to make it work at as low as ₹5.

But, India hasn't made meaningful consumer-end AI strides yet, so for now, we're better left training our eyes on how to make the most of what Google, Amazon, Apple and Sonos have to show to us.

With that, we leave you for a week -- to ponder over whether the AI in your phone is indeed showing signs of being more mature. Until next time, adios.

Beyond AI: A big read you can't miss

The battle for control at the house of Tata, India's largest conglomerate, rages on. Last month, my colleague and Mint's national corporate editor, Varun Sood, wrote about an undisclosed business link that tied Tata Sons's current chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran, and TVS Motors's chairman emeritus and Tata board member, Venu Srinivasan.

Come October, and more fights continue to mar what was, until the mercurial Ratan Naval Tata's passing at age 86 in 2024, one of corporate India's most stable, well-governed ships.

On 1 October, Mint reported on how Noel Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts -- the largest shareholding entity of Tata Sons -- filed regulatory injunctions or 'caveats' with their state's charity commissioner to voice in their side of the story around the management of the Tata empire's multiple shareholding philanthropic trusts. On 6 October, we further reported on how Noel, along with other trustees, openly slammed Tata Sons board members Srinivasan and Vijay Singh for supporting the public listing of Tata's all-powerful corporate holding entity.

Both the stories are hyperlinked here, and make for riveting reads beyond AI. Don't miss out on what promises to be a moment that could forever change the way one of India's most storied business houses have operated for centuries.

Transformer by Mint is a weekly newsletter that brings India's most important and interesting technology updates under one umbrella. As the world transforms with every day of innovation, Transformer will keep a tab on the impact that technologies will make in each of our lives. Published every week, the newsletter brings some of India's tech landscape's most insightful coverages until date.