OnePlus unveils its vision for personalized AI, featuring the Plus Key and Plus Mind, alongside new AI features for productivity, creativity, and security.
OnePlus, the global tech brand best known for pushing smartphone boundaries, has just announced a major shift in its strategy—placing artificial intelligence at the heart of its future products. This pivot is all about making AI feel personal, even intuitive, aiming to integrate seamlessly into everyday life. Leading the charge is the new Plus Key, a hardware feature debuting on the upcoming OnePlus 13s, and a broader suite of AI tools under the new OnePlus AI brand.
Arthur Lam, Director of OxygenOS and AI Strategy at OnePlus, emphasized that the foundation of this AI evolution is understanding what users truly want. According to Lam, people want tools that let them “work smart, play hard and be their authentic selves.”
Plus Key: A New Gateway to Personalized AI
The Plus Key is essentially a customizable hardware button, evolving from the familiar Alert Slider. It’s set to first appear on the OnePlus 13s and then expand across all new OnePlus phones launched this year. What makes it noteworthy? You can program it to do just about anything—switch sound profiles, open the camera, kick off real-time translations, or start a voice recording. Simple but clever.
But here’s where it gets more interesting: one of its primary functions is to activate something called AI Plus Mind. Think of this as your intelligent assistant for managing screen content. Pressing the Plus Key or performing a three-finger swipe captures whatever’s on your screen—schedules, events, booking details, listings—and saves it to a feature called “Mind Space.”
AI Plus Mind doesn’t just take screenshots. It uses AI to understand what’s on your screen. Say you grab an image with an event date; the system can pull the details and drop them right into your calendar. It’s all about reducing clutter and keeping the stuff that actually matters. AI Search ties into this too, allowing you to search saved content using natural language—no cryptic commands needed. And coming later this year, Plus Mind will even categorize your saved content automatically.
For now, AI Plus Mind will launch with the OnePlus 13s, then arrive via update to the broader OnePlus 13 Series, with future support planned for additional models.
Work Smarter, Play Harder with OnePlus AI
To complement this ecosystem, OnePlus is rolling out a series of AI tools designed to boost productivity and creativity:
- AI VoiceScribe: Record, summarize, and even translate meetings and calls within major messaging or video apps.
- AI Call Assistant (India only): Coming to the OnePlus 13s, this offers real-time call translation and summaries through the native dialer.
- AI Translation: A one-stop app for translating text, live speech, camera scans, and even on-screen content.
- AI Search: Search your local files, notes, settings, and calendar with conversational queries. Integration with AI Plus Mind makes this even more fluid.
- AI Reframe: Enhances your photos by analyzing scenes and suggesting better compositions.
- AI Best Face 2.0 (coming this summer via OTA): Fixes group photos by correcting closed eyes or awkward expressions. It works even on images from other devices, and for groups of up to 20 people.
OnePlus also teased deeper integration with Google Gemini. Soon, Gemini will be embedded into OxygenOS apps like Notes and Clock, along with Google’s native apps. With Gemini Live, users can engage in real-time conversations about whatever their camera or screen is showing—a neat blend of digital and physical interaction.
Private Computing Cloud: Balancing Privacy and Performance
A standout concern in any AI discussion is data privacy, and OnePlus is tackling it with its Private Computing Cloud (PCC). The core idea? Keep sensitive processing on the device when possible. But when the workload’s too heavy, PCC steps in with secure, encrypted cloud computing.
All of this happens in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), spanning the user’s device, cloud servers, and the connection between them. The goal is clear: deliver powerful AI while keeping user data locked down and secure.
What OnePlus is building isn’t just a collection of AI features. It’s aiming to create an intelligent system—an AI operating layer that not only respects your data but also learns what you care about most. It might still be early days, but if OnePlus sticks to this path, its AI could very well become the tech-savvy partner you didn’t know you needed.
