Pixel AI doing it right? The new Camera Coach looks promising…

OK, I am generally skeptical about all the new AI features coming out with new phones. Sometimes, it feels that developers are just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Sometimes, things that were promised don’t come to be — imagine calling your entire ecosystem Apple Intelligence and then not delivering on a third of the presentation.

Now, in comes Google with the next-gen AI tech. Firstly, they improved phone call Live Translate. Like by… a lot — it looks like it’s faster, but it also generates the translations using your own voice. Yes, sure, it may be creepy…, but also cool.

But that’s not what I am here to talk about. What really had my ears perked was the new Camera Coach feature — it uses AI to figure out what you are trying to photograph, and gives you guides on how to improve framing.

I was ready to hate this

I was going to write about Camera Coach in an entirely different tone, really. I had snarky remarks and video blurbs ready to go, about how it has AI guiding your hand, taking human expression out of the equation when we talk about photos. “Unless,…” — I was about to end my post — “Unless it actually tells you why it’s making the suggestions that it is, so it would slowly teach you about photography, too”.

Because, let’s face it — a lot of people take pretty bad photos. I am not saying I am amazing at it, but after a few years of reviewing phones and their cameras, I kind of picked up on this and that (read: boss forced me to learn). Really basic principles that aren’t the end-all be-all of photography, but you should kind of understand in order to be able to get a generally OK photo.

And sometimes, when I hand my phone to someone else to take a picture of me — I get reminded that a lot of people just don’t know of these principles. It’s how I end up with photos of me where my head is shaped like a banana, my legs are facing towards the camera in a weird fashion, there’s a ton of headroom above me, the subject of the photo is unclear, the light source is in the frame, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve even had to teach someone that you can tap on the viewfinder if you want the phone to adjust its focus to something that’s further away. Mind-blowing stuff, I know.

Google’s Camera Coach might take you from layman to competent amateur

Now, it probably won’t teach you all about Pro camera settings like shutter speed, aperture values, and whatnot, but what we saw at the Pixel presentation made a lot of sense if you simply want to teach people proper framing. The AI first looks at the scene you are trying to capture, then asks — are you trying to take a portrait here or a more general shot of the mood of the room, or something else.

After that, it’ll tell you if you need to go closer, go lower, back off, look up or down, et cetera. But more importantly — most importantly — it gives you a short blurb of text to let you know exactly why you are doing this. Like “Lower the camera to eye level for a more personal photo” or “Place the head in the upper part of the frame to follow the rule of thirds”.

Now, they are short blurbs, and they don’t take the time to explain what the rule of thirds is. But by simply knowing such a thing exists, you are now free to Google Gemini it, right? Especially on a Pixel phone, ha!

For example, Samsung has had Shot Suggestions within the camera app for some time now. It’s much more basic, and simply gives you a point in the frame where you should center your camera, and an angle to rotate it to. No word on why the phone thinks that’d look good and — spoiler — it often doesn’t. So, I am glad this is not what the Google Camera Coach is, or at least not what it’s trying to be. I’ll test it further when I get my hands on it.

AI is not a one-tap problem solver, but it has its uses

So, in general, my view on the never-ending wave of new AI features hasn’t budged by much. But I just had an a-ha moment, which helped adjust it.

A lot of the AI features that we get are sold to us as a “Problem solver that does it all on its own”. That’s when you will typically hear me groan. First, a lot of the times it’s not “smart” enough to fully do a good job at it, without a hallucination or two. Secondly, a lot of these “Problems” are… not very problematic.

Like the new Magic Cue — sure, it looks pretty impressive, but I am still iffy on whether I will want it on my phone or simply disable it. If you missed that part — it is contextually aware about the content of your received emails / texts. If someone’s asking you a question, it’ll go through your calendars, events, or other conversations and mails to suggest the proper answer. Like “When are you arriving?” – it looks at your plane ticket info and suggests a one-tap response with the exact time. I can’t wait to see the screenshots of AI-hallucinated answers when that goes live.

And to that, I ask — what problem are we solving here? My inability to type out “8:30 PM”?

In my opinion, AI shines when it’s used as a learning helper. Maybe it can’t dive in and teach you the fine nuances and deep intricacies of any field. But it’s pretty good at giving you solid basics to chase. At least that’s how I’ve been using it recently, and I feel like it’s made me a bit less stupid.

So, the Camera Coach here falls in that basket — AI that’s helping you learn the basics and giving you roads and rabbit holes to go down, if you so desire. Otherwise, you can still just use it to help you with the basics and at least improve your photo skills by a little bit. In other words, please stop making me into banana head man, the head should not be near the edge of the frame.