On April 19, Qualcomm will hold an artificial intelligence open day in Shenzhen. As the global leader in the smartphone industry and the inventor of basic technology, Qualcomm has a wealth of experience and technology accumulation in AI, witnessing and promoting the popularity of mobile AI in recent years.

Mobile AI has spread to the point where it is no longer the most attractive means of eye-catching products. But this does not mean that the AI has faded out, but just that everyone is used to the existence of AI. AI has been serving us in all corners of life.

AI ‘improved’ photography level

Due to the irreplaceable role of smartphones in everyday life, and the extremely high frequency of use, phones have naturally become the platform we use most. The most commonly used and most well-known AI functions are mainly from the daily use of smartphones. For example, the AI camera has become a standard for the handsets.

The AI-followed camera recognizes the subject or scene and optimizes the photo. AI also enables smartphones to have a more efficient and realistic background blurring mode, and even makes a single-lens phone without a depth of field camera produce incredible background blurred photos.

When speaking of using AI algorithm to break through the physical limitations, it has to be mentioned that some companies have realized the digital zoom with the resolution of optical zoom through the AI algorithm. So the single-lens phone has an amazing zoom capability as well.

In some of the recently launched products, the phone can use AI scene recognition to help users make composition suggestions before pressing the shutter. This helps users to shoot photos that are close to professional photographers. It is another application for the smartphone to gradually enhance AI capabilities.

The AI camera is a typical representative of the local AI, which has certain requirements for the SoC hardware performance of the phone itself. Many high-end ‘fancy’ camera functions require hardware support from the SoC.

AI makes our smartphone better

The camera is only part of the AI application in the smartphone. In the system level, AI is also playing a silent role. The most common is to analyze user behavior through AI and put the most commonly used functions in a prominent position, or through AI analysis, determine which applications need to be battery-restricted to intelligently reduce unnecessary power consumption.

AI can also intelligently predict and correct when communicating and writing emails, improving the efficiency of entering text.

AI lets us do less

The AI assistant is another popular feature in the past two years. Combined with comprehensive AI task execution such as speech recognition and user behavior analysis, the AI assistant can intelligently perform some tasks.

For example, reminding the user to pay attention to the itinerary before the start of the meeting, or answering the question to the user in real time, or directly helping the user to answer the phone, has a high chance of avoiding the harassment of the phone.

In addition to phones, AI assistants exist on other platforms, such as smart speakers, smart homes and cars. With the rich functions, improved capabilities and more application areas, AI assistants will eventually improve the user’s life and work efficiency in all aspects.

The space for improvement is still huge

At present, AI’s progress space is still huge, especially on local AI. Over-reliance on cloud-based AI can significantly increase the security risks of hardware devices, and it will become useless when the network is not good. So we need to continue to develop the capabilities of local AI. For mobile devices, Qualcomm has been enhancing AI processing power on SoCs. The latest flagship mobile platform, the Snapdragon 855, represents the highest level of mobile AI hardware capabilities.

The Snapdragon 855 integrates the Kryo 485 CPU, Adreno 640 GPU and Hexagon 690 DSP, which form the AI Engine of the Snapdragon 855’s fourth-generation multi-core artificial intelligence engine. Compared with previous generations of AI Engines, the Hexagon 690 DSP has a new tensor accelerator dedicated to AI. With the cooperation of other components, the entire AI Engine has achieved more powerful AI processing capabilities than ever before.