The other AI feature I'm very

curious about and is one I am personally invested in is the audio magic eraser, which is supposed to cut out, what is it, background noise and just kind of all unwanted audio from the video you're taking? Is that essentially the idea?

Yeah. You just record your video like usual, and then you go into the editing tools in Google Photos, and there's a little audio tab, and it separates into some different very basic channels that are labeled like speech and

noise and wind. Super exciting. If it works, does it work?

It works. Yeah. Yeah. This is another one. I'm like, I would use this all the time if this is actually on my phone. So I recorded a little test clip just walking down the busy street near where I live. It's like raining a little bit. There's all kinds of unwanted noise going on and you can hear what it does. Let's hear the before.

With no touching, this is just what the phone itself picks up. Just

taking the Pixel 8 out for a stroll in the rain. And something I've noticed is that audio magic eraser really does best with constant kind of background noise. Something like a crowd or traffic like you're hearing right now sort of comes in and out. It's a little bit harder to control for, but still, I don't know. It's pretty impressive.

Okay, and here is the after with the Audio Magic Eraser turned on. Just

taking the Pixel 8 out for a stroll in the rain, and something I've noticed is that audio magic eraser really does best with constant kind of background noise. Something like a crowd or traffic like you're hearing right now sort of comes in and out. It's a little bit harder to control for, but still, I don't know. It's pretty impressive. Okay,

that's really impressive. It definitely like clips and compresses your voice a bit but it just i mean it gets it got rid of all of the background noise that's wild and

you have like a degree of control over that was like turning everything all the way down so you could leave a little bit in if you didn't want it to sound you can definitely hear those moments when it's like kind of juddering and trying to figure things out. But yeah, it's super impressive.

Yeah. For everyone on the VertiCast who has had to listen to me like shout into my phone over traffic, this is going to be a huge win. There you go. All right. Three more things I'm curious about, and then I'm going to let you go. The first one is the new Tensor processor, which the last Pixel performance was kind of, at times, it got hot. It just wasn't the best. What's the verdict this time? And

I got to say, personally, I never had too much trouble with the last Tensor, but I've seen the reports of, you know, the overheating. And I did notice on this one, I was out standing outside on like a pretty hot day and there's the screens will get a little bit brighter this year. Like the high brightness mode on the 8 Pro actually goes up to 2400 nits, which is super bright. I saw that kick in. I was like, this is great. I can read what's on my phone now. And a couple of minutes in like phone got pretty hot and it just went back down. Oh,

wow. Okay.

Yeah. Which is usually the case on iPhones too. Not uncommon, but with the device kind of in that state, I flipped into the video recording and it gave me a little warning like, eh, iPhone's too hot. It's probably not going to record at the highest quality. So if that is a concern, this is, it was a warm day, but I live in Seattle. I don't live in the tropics. If that's a concern for you, then I'm sorry to say that it might be a little bit more of the same on Tensor G3. Okay.

So the problem's maybe not totally solved, but in general, the Pixel 7, other than when it was sort of at its threshold, did pretty well. And I would assume the same is true this year. Like, I can't imagine you're having sort of day-to performance issues on this phone. Yeah.

No, it handles everything fine. It's those little edge cases where you're really pushing it. Like, I'm trying to take a whole bunch of portrait mode shots really fast, and it's just kind of like slow down lady but overall it's fine okay

uh and then temperature sensor which it has is that useful for anything this is like a this strikes me so much as a thing that like google just happened to have a bunch of these lying around a factory somewhere so they put them in have you found it valuable at all to have in in these funds?

No, not, not at all. Like I have a moment where I'm like, oh, I'm drinking. This is a hot cup of coffee. I'll get the phone and see what the temperature is. And it, it gives you, you know, degrees or whatever. It's just like, but there's text on it. It just says hot. I'm like, uh, yeah. All right. I, I knew that actually. I didn't need a sensor to tell you that.

Yeah. Thanks, Google. That's AI at work right there.

That's our AI dollars at work. I don't know. And then last thing is battery life.

How did the Pixel 8s stand up? Yeah,

it seems to be fine. I think like Google very smartly doesn't make any particular claims of like better battery life or better power efficiency. And I'm finding that both of the phones will get through a full day with varying degrees of like a comfortable percentage left at the end of the day. Sure. Yeah.

Presumably the Pro does a bit better just by virtue of being larger. Yeah,

that one you could if you're just kind of a moderate user, you can push into the next day. But yeah, full day of use is just a kind of a blanket like, yeah, you'll you'll get that.

Okay, that's good. So overall, it seems like there's no kind of one mind blowing earth shattering new thing here, which in a smartphone in 2023 is not entirely unexpected. But I do think Google has been on this grind of like, we can do a lot of little AI things. There's a bunch of that in here where they're doing the summaries of web pages in the browser with AI and the better spam call filtering and all that kind of stuff. Does that all add up to much for you? Like, does the full sort of AI story make the pixels more compelling than what you're getting from Samsung or Apple or any of these other companies at this point? It's

starting to. And I feel like that's kind of been Google's pitch with the pixels for the past couple of years. It's like, it's so smart. It's going to do these things for you. It's going to make your life easier. And you know, the pixel six and pixel seven, like they're good phones. I don't feel like there was anything it was doing that was just really making my life easier. I think that promise is like, could start to come true in the pixel eight. And some of it depends on assistant with Bard, which is going to come at some point in the future. Potentially. Yes. This is Google. So take that as you will. But that could really make Google Assistant very useful to be able to ask it questions that require checking multiple sources or looking in your email. And I think there's a lot of potential there. There's also you get seven years of OS updates, which

is a big deal. It really is. I remain, as we've talked about, unconvinced that Google is even going to make phones still in seven years. So who knows? But I do think that's a real promise. And that's a big deal. If that is actually true in seven years from now, your phone is still good and functional and up to date. Like that's huge. And that's a real reason to buy these phones.

Yeah. Yeah. So it seems like there's potentially like really useful things coming to it. The assistant voice typing is quite a bit better in the Pixel 8. It actually will like understand your sort of inflection and pauses and it'll put punctuation in rather than like an entire long string of text, which is like, God bless my mother, but that is what I get from her every time she texts me. And you kind of seem like a sociopath when you do that. But I'm like, I would actually maybe use voice texting on this phone. And that's not a thing I consider. So there's a lot of potential. I think there's more potential for the Pixel 8 and the 8 Pro to be this phone of like, it actually does make your life a little easier. But it's, you got to put your trust in Google to get there.

Yeah, as with so many things, I just reviewed the Meta three and it's the same thing. It's like, look, no wrong answers. If you feel good about it, knock yourself out. If you don't, I totally understand. But like, let's all be clear-eyed about what you're signing up for here. And it all means somebody is going to see a lot of what you do in your life all the time. Oh

yeah. Yeah. You got to be good with that too. Yeah. No big deal.

All right.