Did I ever share my little vision of future phones that listen in and contribute to conversations? When voice recognition and some basic conversational AI are well-developed, I can imagine that phones would listen to the conversations, both calls and environmental conversations (when they’re sitting on the table between two people), and constantly scan for some sort of question they could answer.
Just now someone asked me in a call “What time is it?”. Of course, I had to look at my phone to answer that, so it’s sorta obvious that a nosy phone could answer that one. But the scope could be much larger than that with Internet-connected phones running little background searches for anything interesting and piping in with answers.
Futurama had a good bit about that, though the computer wasn’t in portable form. See number 12 here.