I thought it was marketing BS at first, but the responsiveness of AI related tasks on my Pixel 7 is much better than any phone I’ve ever used. Voice-to-text is almost never wrong, and processes just as fast as you speak. The photo editing, OCR, Lens search, and all the other random features that are time and time again extremely useful are snappy as hell.

I don’t play games on my phone outside of BTD6 and random ones when I’m bored on an airplane, but they’ve all ran fine without hitching. At the top end the phone is behind, but it’s just not my use case to run games at 200 FPS on mobile.

Pixels have always been a software first phone with features that seem niche but actually turn out to be extremely useful. This is the first phone I’ve had that I can use to improve my interactions with the real world in a meaningful way, and it’s very clear that is the direction the Pixel is heading towards.

I’ve only used the live translate feature once, but when I did it felt magical. I was able to communicate with someone who only spoke Mandarin, in English, almost as fast as if we both spoke a common language. It’s probably the closest thing we have to a universal translator device and it was awesome.

With that said I’m one person, and I completely understand some people need a powerful phone, but I think for most the processor is more than enough, and they could benefit from the extra features.