Android AICore allows you to “run generative AI functions directly on the hardware of your Android phone or tablet.” These models (Gemini Nano) are inherently large, but Google now has a more detailed explanation for why Android’s AICore storage occasionally increases.
AICore is available on Android 14 and up for supported devices (processors). Google provides a list of which features and apps use the local model:
- Advanced correction: Improves grammatical correctness and language understanding as you type.
- Automatic speech recognition (ASR): Convert streamed audio and audio files into text transcriptions.
- Scam detection: Identifies messages that may be considered spam or scams.
- smart response: Provides high-quality, context-based response suggestions in messaging apps. For example, it works on WhatsApp, Line and KakaoTalk through Gboard.
- Summary: Automatically creates concise summaries of recorded audio. For example, it works in the Recorder app.
- Translation: Easily translate text from one language to another.
More broadly, on-device AI is credited with enabling greater privacy, offline functionality, and faster, more consistent performance:
- “Sensitive information remains on your device. It is never sent to the cloud or Google.”
- “AI-powered features work even when you’re offline or in Airplane mode. This includes text summaries and smart replies.”
- “Local processing eliminates the delay associated with cloud-based services and provides a faster, more reliable experience.”
TO Google Support Article now explains “Why storage usage is increasing.” When a new version of Gemini Nano is available, AICore “temporarily maintains both the old and new version of the model for up to 3 days.”
This is intended to be a “safety system that allows your phone to instantly revert to a previous version if the new update encounters a bug, rather than having to download gigabytes of data again.”
When the system confirms that the update is stable, the additional storage space is automatically deleted.
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