Nothing’s New Essential Key Makes Reminders Easy… And Confusing

AI, as they say, is the next big thing, and smartphone makers can’t go a minute without mentioning it. And, eventually, cramming it into their phones as an excuse for you to upgrade. With the launch of their new Phone (3a) series (review), Nothing also joined the AI bandwagon. They added a dedicated AI button dubbed the Essential key. This new feature is meant to make reminders easy, but my experience with it suggests otherwise.

What’s So Essential About Nothing’s Essential Key?

What exactly is Nothing‘s new Essential key about, then? It is a hardware button that lets you invoke the Essential Space which is an AI-powered app that draws contexts from screenshots and images and stitches them together with audio recordings, or notes to create actionable tasks.

The idea itself sounds pretty unique on paper, and something no other brand has managed to pull off so far. You press this key, it takes a screenshot of whatever’s on your screen. This screenshot is sent over to the Essential Space app where the AI performs its sorcery, drawing information out of the screen grabs to automatically add context, and create a task or reminder if possible.

To make things more precise, you can add a note to the screenshot when you press the Essential key, or hold it down to record a voice memo. This gives the AI more context and churns out more accurate reminders and to-dos for you. Neat, trick right? So how well does it work in regular usage?

More Than Pixel Screenshots

When I first got my hands on the feature, I dismissed it as a Pixel Screenshots wannabe. However, it proved me wrong right from the get-go. The feature started intriguing me when missed a call from my mum and accidentally clicked the Essential key on the call log. A day later, I got an alert “Missed call from Mummy on Monday” reminding me to call her back.

This incident lured my attention and right after this, I went on a screenshot spree. While scrolling Instagram, I came across a reel whose song I was interested in. So I tapped the Essential key and asked it to “Remind me to listen to the song” without specifying any time. A day or two later, I received a reminder to listen to the video’s featured artist.

It is also well-versed in several languages. I grabbed a screenshot of my friend’s chat. We were talking in Hinglish, and the AI easily summarized that we were planning on meeting sometime soon.

My colleague, who has also been testing the Phone (3a), clicked a photo of a tool and asked Essential key “Remind me to buy batteries for this“. It automatically understood it was an infrared thermometer and created a to-do task for “Purchase batteries for infrared thermometer“.

In another instance, he grabbed a bottle at random and reminded himself to purchase one like that using the Essential key. The app automatically described the bottle’s appearance and recommended where to buy it from, suggesting Amazon or offline stores. Although we have more examples, the gist is that the Essential Space makes it easy to create actionable tasks and reminders without much effort on your part. So what’s confusing about it?

Nothing is Perfect

The Essential Space and all its features are currently in early development. As a result, you can’t expect it to offer consistent results every time. The examples I mentioned above are some instances that surprised me, but there are others where I was disappointed.

Take for example the missed call incident. I tried to recreate it and didn’t receive an alert even days after clicking the screenshot. I took a chance and snapped my bus ticket with Essential Key. Hoping it would remind me just in time to catch it. I received the notification right when my bus was supposed to leave. Thanks to Google Calendar, which fetched the details of my journey through Gmail and reminded me an hour before the bus’ arrival.

The main dissent here is that it takes a while to process the data and generate results. This has improved over a recent update, so it takes less than a minute to generate results. But it still is disappointing that you cannot interact with it in real-time, something I can do with Google’s Gemini. So if you misspoke something, like mentioning the wrong time, you cannot correct it.

Another contention appeared when I clicked a random poster and asked it to save the number. But it couldn’t do much other than extracting the number for me. Essential Space for now is limited to my smartphone. It doesn’t sync to any app or work cross-platform. While I can wait for the latter, I would appreciate it to work with at least the stock apps.

Nothing’s Essential Key: So, What’s the Verdict?

From everything I have detailed above, it is clear that the Essential Space isn’t perfect and not a reliable option as of now. However, it shows potential. Nothing CEO, Carl Pei mentioned that they will bring support for connect experience later down the line, and it will only improve over time. Maybe months later, it will instantly summarize the contents of a screenshot, and work in real time.

For now, though, I am going to stick to my regular reminder and to-do apps. But I would love to switch to Essential Space, if and when, it starts showing more promise and consistent results.