Voice assistants have been part of smartphones for years, but they’ve mostly been limited to simple tasks. Asking for the weather or setting a timer works fine. Anything more involved usually sends you back to tapping through apps yourself.
The AGI app stood out for us in a big way at CES 2026 for this reason. Instead of acting as a layer on top of your phone, the voice-driven, AI phone assistant works directly with your operating system and the apps already installed on it. You don’t search through settings or menus. You just say what you want done, and the app handles the steps for you.
In practice, that can be as basic as asking your phone to go on silent, turn location services on or off, or change a system setting you’d normally have to dig for. It also extends to full app workflows. If you ask it to book an Uber to CES, it opens the Uber app, sets the destination, confirms the ride, and completes the booking. The same approach works for food delivery, messaging, and other multi-step tasks that usually require a lot of screen time.
Watching it in action, this felt much closer to what people expect when they hear “hands-free control.” You’re not learning special phrases or adapting how you speak. You talk normally, and the phone adapts to you.
There are clear accessibility benefits as well. Being able to operate apps by voice can make smartphones far more usable for people with mobility or vision challenges, and for anyone who needs to stay hands-free while driving, cooking, or moving between places.
What makes this work is how the system interacts with apps. Rather than relying on a fixed list of commands or brittle shortcuts, the AGI app navigates screens the way a person would, responding to what’s actually on the display. That means it’s less likely to break when an app updates its interface or moves buttons around.
AGI’s approach is designed to work on the device itself instead of constantly sending requests to the cloud. That keeps interactions feeling quick and responsive, and it avoids the sense that every action is being routed through a remote server.
The mobile app shown at CES is part of a broader agent platform AGI, Inc. is building, aimed at letting AI systems carry out real tasks across operating systems, browsers, and apps. The app is still in private, waitlist-based access, but the core idea is already clear in the demos.
Visit theagi.company for more information about the AGI app and to sign up for early access.
[Image credit: Techlicious]
