OnePlus has been experimenting with AI in its smartphones for the last year, but the company is now making a bigger push by bringing more tools to its current flagships and future phones.
Under the OnePlus AI banner, the company’s new features will debut on the new OnePlus 13s. The phone is designed for the Asian market and won’t launch in the US, but most new AI features are also set to come to the OnePlus 13 series in a future update.
AI Plus Mind
OnePlus’ main focus here is a feature called AI Plus Mind. This allows you to screenshot whatever you see on your screen, and your phone makes a note of what it was for later while adding contextual AI info such as a link to the source, a summary of what it saw, and sometimes even links to other services.
For example, if you take a screenshot of an article you’re reading, it’ll include a link to that piece and an AI summary about what it was able to view on the screen. Or, if you take a screenshot of a chat you had with a friend to meet at a restaurant, Plus Mind will understand the context and suggest that it generate a calendar entry for the meet-up.
In a demo with the feature, we found that it adequately summarized what was on screen, but it excelled in specific scenarios, like the plans within a messaging app. We tried it with a PCMag article about Starlink’s residential lite plan expanding to further states in the US. It summarized what it could see on screen, which was the headline, the first line of the article, the date, the image at the top, and the author.
The OnePlus AI Plus Mind results for the article above. (Credit: James Peckham)
The AI summary gave some rough notes, but it mostly reworded the article’s subhead. Our article read, “The more affordable $80-per-month plan is now available in parts of Alaska, California, and Texas.” The AI notes from OnePlus said “Price: $80 per month” and “Availability: Alaska, California, and Texas.”
It also gave the article’s author and the date it was published in bullet points. It then said the “Provider” was SpaceX, which wasn’t as clear as the other elements of the summary. It finished with hashtags that noticed the article was about SpaceX, Starlink, and Technology News.
Arthur Lam, OnePlus’ director of OxygenOS and AI Strategy, tells PCMag the company is experimenting with ways for Plus Mind to look at a full web page for its summaries, which would make it more powerful than its current version.
On the OnePlus 13s and likely future OnePlus devices, a dedicated Plus Key replaces the company’s familiar alert slider. Pressing that button will automatically screenshot and add the content to Plus Mind. There’s no dedicated Plus Mind app in your phone’s app drawer, but when you first use the feature, it will add a shortcut to your home screen.
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It’s unclear when the feature will arrive on the OnePlus 13 series, but when it does, it will be activated by swiping up on the phone’s screen with three fingers.
Show Your ‘Best Face’
Other new AI features from OnePlus include improved translation tools that combine text, audio, camera, and screen translation into one application. There’s also an AI Reframe feature that analyzes your photography to determine when it would be better to edit or crop it.
An upcoming update to the company’s Best Face tool will replace people’s faces with better ones from other photographs. The new Best Face 2.0 now allows up to 20 faces to be edited through the feature to remove issues like people blinking or making silly faces.
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AI VoiceScribe, meanwhile, records and summarizes meetings within popular messaging apps, but that feature is not coming to the US.
Private Computing Cloud
The company will prioritize on-device processing for highly sensitive information, but OnePlus says some tasks will require it to use cloud tech (similar to Apple Intelligence). In those scenarios, it will use its new Private Computing Cloud feature.
Details are scarce on how this works, but OnePlus says, “When more intensive computation is required, the company’s Private Computing Cloud provides a secure, encrypted environment for data processing, designed to keep user data private and inaccessible to unauthorized parties.
“This is achieved through a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that spans the user’s device, the cloud servers, and the data transfer process itself.”
Don’t expect all these AI features to be available in one application. The company confirmed to PCMag it has no plans to make a dedicated OnePlus AI app. “In five years from now, we will not see different features as AI-powered,” Lam said. “Everything will be AI-powered. We want to tell you about the experience and lifestyle to make sense of it from that perspective.”
About James Peckham
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