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Remember Moto AI? Motorola finally has an update on it

A person taking a photo with the Motorola Razr 2024.
Motorola Razr 2024 Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

When Motorola launched the Razr Plus 2024 this year, it also mentioned some of its own AI-powered tools, appropriately named Moto AI. However, we’ve only seen Moto AI through a couple of image-generation tools like Magic Canvas and Style Sync. Now, Motorola has just announced at Lenovo Tech World 2024 that more Moto AI tools are coming, at least in beta form.

Motorola discussed some Moto AI features earlier this year, including Catch Me Up and Remember This. The Catch Me Up feature lets you get a prioritized summary of your notifications so you don’t have to scroll through a bunch of missed notifications. There is also Pay Attention, which helps users recall instructions or details without having to write notes or listen to long recordings. Remember This captures live moments or onscreen information when activated and saves it while providing AI-powered insights.

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These features will finally be included in a beta program, with invites sent out throughout the year. Through the beta, Motorola will refine these tools in Moto AI based on consumer feedback. Unfortunately, we don’t know what devices are being included in this beta or how people are being chosen to get invited. It’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still a lot unknown.

There’s also Moto AI news around large action models (LAMs). This is still just a proof-of-concept feature, but in theory, it should be able to understand your environment, learn from your behavior to offer personalized responses, translate natural language into actions, and execute them on your behalf. In short, Motorola’s LAMs are like contextually aware personal assistants that deliver humanlike interactions through natural language.

A home screen on the inner display of the Motorola Razr Plus 2024.
Joe Maring / Digital Trends

During Tech World 2024, Motorola showed off how the Moto AI LAMs would work by using the command “order me an iced americano” as an example. Moto AI will locate the nearest coffee shop to the user, place the order, and then let the user know it’s ready for pickup. Other use cases for this could include common actions like requesting an Uber, where Moto AI will get the destination info, confirm the ride, give the user the car and pickup details, and provide an ETA.

The last Moto AI feature that Motorola brought up is Smart Connect. The goal behind Smart Connect is to unify the Motorola and Lenovo ecosystems, and with AI tools, that experience could be even better.

Intelligent Awareness would let users manage their devices through natural language commands. This means discovering, connecting, and controlling everything from smartphones to smart home devices. It’s basically hybrid AI, which selects the best AI model for each task to boost productivity and creativity. With Smart Connect, devices that don’t already have built-in AI tools will become AI-enabled. This would also involve cross-device search and smart actions.

The back of the Motorola Razr Plus 2024 in green.
Joe Maring / Digital Trends

This all sounds mighty impressive on paper. However, aside from demos, we have yet to see how any of the LAMs will work in real-world use. Plus, Motorola first talked about Moto AI with the Razr series that launched in the summer, and we are only now getting a couple more Moto AI features in a beta — again, with no explanation of how that beta will be rolled out.

Such a staggered release doesn’t instill much faith in how this will all come to fruition, especially when Motorola didn’t even hint at a possible time frame for the LAMs and Smart Connect features, aside from the phrase “near future” for only the latter. It’s encouraging to hear the company talking about Moto AI again, but it’s clear it still has a way to go before catching up to the likes of Samsung Galaxy AI and Apple Intelligence.

Christine Romero-Chan
Christine Romero-Chan has been writing about technology, specifically Apple, for over a decade. She graduated from California…
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