AI Upgrades to Motorola's Smart Connect at MWC Make It More Essential Than Ever

Since Motorola debuted its Smart Connect tool in 2024, it's acquired 9 million monthly users, but it could be about to gain a whole lot more, thanks to upgrades announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

Until now, Smart Connect has allowed cross-device integration between select Motorola and Lenovo products in much the same way Apple makes it easy to transfer tasks, apps and files between devices in its own ecosystem. But Motorola announced at MWC that it's opening up Smart Connect so that it's available on all Windows 10 and 11 PCs and will also allow for more integration for other Android devices, creating an easy and seamless way for you to cast, share and search across your phone, tablet and PC.

Casting your phone screen to your laptop is easier than ever.

Katie Collins/CNET

Already the beauty of Smart Connect is that it lets you swipe up on activities you may be undertaking on your Motorola phone -- watching a TikTok video, for example -- to transfer them to your Lenovo laptop and carry on watching (although they do have to be on the same Wi-Fi network). Now you can do that via voice or text command, telling your device using natural language which activity or document you want to transfer to and from ("grab my taxi receipts from my phone and send them to my laptop," for example), and it follows through instantly.

This is one of the ways the updated Smart Connect is tapping into the powers of AI in a genuinely useful way. In a demo, I also witnessed how you could use a voice command to search across different devices for a document that contained a list of restaurants but did not actually contain the word "restaurant." Using context clues, the AI knows that the document on your tablet is, in fact, full of restaurant recommendations and lets you view it on your phone or PC.

Another new feature in Smart Connect is a device-management dashboard, which lets you see all your devices in one place to allow for easy management. This and the other latest features will be available in the coming weeks by downloading Smart Connect from the Microsoft or Google Play stores.