Your battery is paying the price for AI — here's the fix

by · Android Police

Phone makers are locked in an all-out AI arms race. Google and Samsung are at the front, pushing generative AI, predictive typing, and always-on assistants into every corner of the Android OS.

But all that AI comes at a cost. These features chew through RAM, constantly call home to cloud servers, and keep the NPU firing all day.

Unsurprisingly, users are starting to push back, and industry data shows their dissatisfaction is growing.

A 2025 survey from CNET found that only 11% of US smartphone owners upgrade their devices because of AI features, down 7% from the same survey in 2024.

For most buyers, the priorities haven’t changed much. Price (62%), longer battery life (54%), and more storage (39%) still top the list.

It’s no surprise that many people would rather have better battery life than more AI features. So here’s how to trim the computational fat and get back some battery.

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How your phone’s brain is working overtime and draining battery

Cloud computing isn’t doing all the work anymore. With chips like Google Tensor, your device carries out some of the AI tasks on its own.

A Neural Processing Unit (NPU) is a dedicated section of the processor engineered to handle the complex math behind machine learning.

It powers tasks such as speech recognition, image processing, and live text translation, all of which consume battery power.

Another major drain on your battery comes from the RAM overload. On-device LLMs like Gemini Nano keep a large portion of their model weights loaded in RAM at all times, so they don’t have to fetch data from slower device storage.

When the operating system reserves a big chunk of RAM for AI, there’s less available for everyday apps. That triggers more frequent memory pressure, which can cause Android to close some apps.

If you reopen them later, your phone uses even more battery than if they had been left running.

Finally, even when AI features are advertised as on-device, if the AI isn’t sure it can handle a request, it can call home to the cloud. This uses your Wi-Fi or cellular and extra battery power.

Pixel phones are prone to AI battery drain

Google’s Pixel phones are often the most susceptible to AI-driven battery drain due to the deep integration of the AICore system service.

Turning off Now Playing and Live Translate

Now Playing identifies background music playing in your environment and displays the song title on your lock screen.

It works offline using a localized database and audio processing, which contributes to battery drain. To turn it off:

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Navigate to Sound & vibration.
  3. Tap Now Playing.
  4. Toggle Identify songs playing nearby to Off.

The same logic applies to Live Translate. This feature detects foreign languages in your text messages or media and translates them in real time.

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Tap System.
  3. Tap Live Translate.
  4. Toggle it Off

AI wallpapers and cinematic effects

Google introduced AI-powered wallpapers and cinematic effects that rely on the NPU to add depth or make full images from scratch.

These features drain energy because they keep the GPU and NPU active to render the 3D warping effect as you move your phone.

For better battery life, use a static wallpaper and, if possible, pick a dark theme. That’s because on OLED screens, black pixels are nearly turned off, which helps cut the display’s power use.

Smart Replies and features with screen context analysis

Google Messages and Gboard’s Smart Reply rely on generative AI to guess your next response. This means your phone is always scanning the text on screen and figuring out the conversation context.

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If saving a few seconds on a text isn’t worth the battery drain caused by continuous live smart suggestions, turn it off.

You can turn these off on Gboard by going to Settings > Text correction > Next-word suggestions, and in Google Messages under Settings > Suggestions.

Pixel Screenshots

Pixel Screenshots is a dedicated repository for your captured images. It uses on-device semantic analysis to make the text and objects inside those images searchable.

When you take a screenshot, your device starts a background process that runs Optical Character Recognition and object detection models across the image. This processing is resource-intensive. To stop it:

  1. Open the Pixel Screenshots app.
  2. Tap the settings gear icon in the upper-right corner.
  3. Toggle Search your screenshots with on-device AI to Off.

Don’t let AI run your battery into the ground

We’re being sold a vision of the future where our devices act as extensions of our minds, constantly calculating and predicting what we’ll do next. But that vision has a cost.

Prediction and background identification draw from your battery’s limited supply. That said, not all AI features are wasteful. Some features, like adaptive battery, can actually help if they’re done right.

If you don’t use these AI features much and find them more gimmick than useful, switch them off one at a time and see the difference.