Now you can control your phone with offline AI — No APIs, no cloud, no latency

The next frontier of artificial intelligence isn’t just a chatbot that talks back; it’s an AI Agent that acts. Until now, giving an AI the power to control your phone required complex API integrations, expensive cloud tokens, and a constant internet connection. That has changed with the introduction of Mobile Actions on Android via the Google AI Edge Gallery.

By moving the logic from a remote server directly onto your phone’s silicon, you can now add AI features to your device that work instantly and entirely offline.

What is Mobile Actions?

Mobile Actions is a specialized implementation of “Function Calling.” Instead of a Large Language Model (LLM) simply predicting the next word in a sentence, it predicts a structured command. When you say “Turn on the flashlight,” the local model doesn’t just reply “Okay”—it identifies the specific Android intent needed to toggle your hardware and executes it.

This is powered by FunctionGemma, a remarkably efficient 270-million parameter model specifically fine-tuned for the Android environment. Because it is so small, it runs on mid-range hardware with almost zero battery drain compared to massive cloud models.

How to Add AI Features to Your Phone (No API Required)

Traditional AI integration requires a developer to set up a backend, manage API keys, and pay for every request. With the local Edge AI workflow, you can bypass the cloud entirely. Here is the process:

1. Get the Environment

Download the Google AI Edge Gallery app. This serves as the local “host” or runtime for your models. It provides the interface between the AI’s output and your phone’s operating system.

2. Load the Model from Hugging Face

The app integrates directly with Hugging Face. You don’t need to write code to download models; you simply authorize the app to pull the FunctionGemma or Gemma 3 weights. These are stored locally in your phone’s storage.

3. Use “Mobile Actions”

Inside the app, switch to the “Mobile Actions” tab. You can now perform tasks like:

• Device Control: “Open my Bluetooth settings” or “Maximize brightness.”
• Utility: “Set a timer for 10 minutes” or “Take a screenshot.”
• Information Retrieval: “Find my last contact added” or “Search for photos from yesterday.”

For Developers: Creating Custom Actions

The most powerful aspect of this technology is the ability to extend it. You can create your own “recipes” for specific apps. The workflow uses .litertlm files—a lightweight format optimized for mobile NPUs.

Google has open-sourced the Mobile Actions Dataset. Developers can use this to fine-tune the 270M model to recognize custom commands for their own applications, essentially giving any app a local “Siri” that doesn’t need a server to understand user intent.

Conclusion: The End of AI Latency

By eliminating the API and the cloud, we are entering an era of “zero-latency” interactions. Your phone becomes more than a screen; it becomes a proactive assistant that understands your needs in real-time, regardless of your data connection. The Google AI Edge Gallery is the first step toward making every Android app “AI-native” without the privacy risks or costs of the cloud.