Of all the AI-related features that PC-makers showed off at CES 2024, the one I want most doesn’t have much to do with AI at all.
It’s from Lenovo, and it lets you stealthily step out of video meetings by recording a three-second video of yourself, which loops in forward and reverse until you’re ready to return.
The only AI angle is how you invoke the feature: Lenovo has developed a sidebar menu in Windows called AI Now, which can launch features and adjust system settings in response to natural language. To duck out of a meeting, you just type “I’m leaving,” then click a confirmation button. Another button to end the video loop appears in the same sidebar.
Lenovo can’t claim full credit for the idea. Zoom users figured out years ago that they could record looping videos of themselves, then use those files as video backgrounds to temporarily escape meetings.
But Lenovo’s version is much simpler, which is partly why it brought the feature to CES in the first place. The company wants to show how AI could help people get things done on their computers without navigating through complex menus. To that end, Lenovo also showed how AI Now can adjust system settings such as Dark Mode, with all commands processed on the PC instead of in the cloud.
Now the bad news: It’s unclear whether Lenovo will launch AI Now and its video call duck-out feature outside of China. The company says it’s still evaluating its options, but my guess is that it may not want AI Now to conflict with Microsoft’s own Copilot AI sidebar, which does depend on internet connectivity and doesn’t have a sneaky way to walk away from Zoom calls. I can already tell you which one I’d find more useful.
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