But AI could totally tell you the top rated lawn mowers in stock in your area based on fake bought and paid for reviews to optimize your efficiency at mowing your lawn and increasing the capitalist profit margins of local stores that pay Google for increased foot traffic to their stores.

"Need" really imposes some incredibly urgent something.

I actually do love automation, but why use ai for that? Macrodroid, tasker, automate.... But hey, they NEED us to need it.

Back when I used an iPhone, I had a few automations through Shortcuts, but nothing critical. Then I got a Pixel, put Graphene on it, and started learning how Android works. At the same time I went all in on Home Assistant over Alexa.

It's been over a year now, so I figured I'd see what I can automate between my phone and my house.

The short answer is: nothing.

There is absolutely nothing that I need my phone to do automatically. Not a single task I need it to accomplish on my behalf.

I saw a post on Reddit a few weeks ago in the Tasker sub. A guy was talking about how one of his automations was to send a randomly selected affirmation or quote from some website to each of his loved ones at 7am. I'm still not quite over that level of psychopathy. The notion that the correct way to show affection is to have an automation randomly select a message to send them every morning.

Paying for parking in my city requires a phone.

You either have to use the QR code, a text message, or call a line with an auto-attendant. There is no physical kiosk on the street to use.

The only 2 tasks that have been worth automating for me on my phone is time-based volume/vibration switching and VPN turn-on and off when I am on home internet or away.

No need to steal people's water to do it.

AI could be useful if it could orchestrate more complex tasks that the relevant apps don't natively support. But of course that's not what we're getting.

I use lots and lots of timers every day to structure my chores and work. For example, I'd sometimes love to be able to start one timer, and have another one set to automatically start as soon as I stop the ringing from the first (which might take a few minutes).

Very simple requirements, but specialized enough that I'd have to write it myself. But I can't see phone AIs supporting something like this in this decade.