iPhone Duo lacks FaceTime Eye Contact
Gizmodo, citing MacRumors, reports that Apple’s iPhone Duo does not support the FaceTime Eye Contact feature, which uses on-device AI to make users appear to look into the camera during a call. The feature has been available across numerous iPhone models since iOS 14, but Apple has not explained the omission or said when it might be added.
The missing on-device AI feature is a notable difference between the iPhone Duo and several existing iPhones, although its cause and potential availability timeline remain unconfirmed.
It’s now been around three days since an iPhone Duo owner complained on the MacRumors forums that something was “a little off” during their FaceTime calls. The note prompted a bit of an investigation, and MacRumors itselfconfirmed on Monday what that user had feared: Apple’s first foldable does not support FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature.
Eye Contact, for those unfamiliar, is essentially the FaceTime version of that creepy Nvidia feature of the same name that, for about five minutes in 2023, made me feel like I was talking to an AI interviewer every time I video-called someone who owned a gaming PC. It uses on-device AI to make it appear as though you’re looking directly into the camera while FaceTiming someone, even when you’re almost certainly looking elsewhere on the screen.
This feature has been widely available across the iPhone line since the launch of iOS 14. That means the normie iPhone 14 has it. The iPhone 13 mini has it. The SE 2 (which also doesn’t support Face ID—sorry to anyone who was about to shout that theory at me) has it.