The Pixel 11 Pro is a great phone, no thanks to its flashiest new features
The Verge · LC · trust 56/100
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Forget HiLight and Proactive Assistance. The Pixel 11 Pro is at its best with focused new tools that actually work.
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Google is trying to get you off your phone. The Pixel 11 Pro is “ A Phone Designed to Help You Use It Less ,” the company promises. It can proactively help you book restaurant reservations, take the best frames from a video, and help you voice-text significantly faster. The pitch is that the new features bundled with the Pixel 11 series of phones can help fix your relationship with technology — one that Google knows has badly degraded in recent years.
But the hardware of the Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL is very similar to last year’s models — and in at least one case, a downgrade — so those software features are pretty much the entire pitch.
Over the last week testing the 11 Pro, I’ve been trying them all to see how much they can help me put my phone down. Like many experiences with Google software, when they work, they are genuinely helpful. But getting them to work often requires a very narrow set of circumstances that some Google engineer probably dreamed up in the “society if” utopia lab.
The Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL are minor hardware updates compared to last year’s Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL . They both get brighter 3,600-nit screens. Their charging has been upgraded, with faster wired speeds and Qi2.2 for up to 25W when wireless. The 5x optical telephoto camera has a bigger sensor that Google says enables 30 percent more light intake. Storage now starts at 256GB, instead of 128GB. And there’s also a fancy new “notification light,” which I’ll get to in a bit.
Unfortunately, these upgrades come with a downgrade too, for the base model at least. The 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL now start with less RAM: 12GB compared to the 16GB that came standard last year, the same amount as the regular Pixel 11. I’m testing the 16GB / 512GB model, so unfortunately I can’t tell you if the RAM decrease is noticeable. That base model is also $100 more expensive than last year, too, at $1,099.
With such minor spec changes, Google has gone all in on software this year. And this time, that software’s primary purpose is to get you off your phone, or at least get tedious tasks done faster so you can get back to your life.
Perhaps the largest push in this direction is the Pixel 11’s new “Proactive Assistance” feature. This is a set of dynamic chips that appear when certain interactions happen on your phone, like a friend asking what your schedule looks like next week or if you booked that table at a restaurant yet.
For the most basic interactions, like checking availability or adding an event to my calendar, I found Proactive Assistance really helpful. I practically live inside my calendar, and text conversations about scheduling are common. When my friend Marc texted me asking when I was available next week, Gemini popped up and suggested checking my calendar for times. Outside of simple scenarios like that, though, Proactive Assistance gets less reliable. One of Google’s key examples is letting Gemini book a dinner reservation for you if you’re chatting about heading out to eat, but I had to receive a text with an extremely specific string of information to get it to work — and even then it only worked sometimes .
For example, receiving the text “Can you make a reservation at Frankie Spuntino next Saturday at 7pm?” surfaced a chip to agentically try to make the reservation. But if the message doesn’t include the date or time, it won’t invoke anything at all. Most of the time when the chip does show up, it disappears the moment I reply. Occasionally it will stick around if the AI thinks we’re still talking about the restaurant, but those instances were few and far between. I wish Google would keep the chip around for at least a few messages, or have it float around the messages in some way.
One promise of large language models is the ability to understand what you mean and remove the requirements for smart keywords, so it’s odd that explicit keywords are still necessary to get so much of Proactive Assistance to work. I can see what Google is trying to do with this and I can maybe see a future where it gets refined, but as it stands, it’s simply too inconsistent. Plus, I had to manually toggle on Proactive Assistance and add OpenTable to connected apps in settings, which I just don’t think most people will know to do. As my colleague Cameron Faulkner puts it, “You need to be proactive to get Proactive Assistance to work.”
Proactive Assistance is advertised as working with other scenarios too, like surfacing your flight information when someone asks what time your flight is or bringing up the right photo when someone asks for it. But both of these scenarios either failed or were inconsistent for me. Asking when my flight is supposed to land surfaced nothing even though I have flight information in my Gmail, and when my friend asked for a photo of me from 2024, it surfaced photos from 2024, but none of me. It’s disappointing that this feature only works in such narrow circumstances. I can see the vision, but the execution just isn’t there yet.
Another feature that got a lot of marketing hype but flatlined on its delivery…
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