From CNet:
One of my biggest takeaways from MWC was that while all tech companies now have a raft of AI tools at their disposal, most are choosing to deploy them in different ways.
Take smartphones. Samsung has developed Gauss, its own large language model (the tech that underlies AI chatbots), to focus on translation on the Galaxy S24, whereas Honor uses AI to include eye tracking on its newly unveiled Magic 6 Pro — which I got to try out at its booth. Oppo and Xiaomi, meanwhile, both have on-device generative AI that they’re applying to phone cameras and photo editing tools.
It goes to show that we’re entering a new period of experimentation as tech companies figure out what AI can do, and crucially how it can improve our experience of using their products.
Samsung’s Y.J. Kim, an executive vice president at the company and head of its language AI team, told reporters at an MWC roundtable that Samsung thought deeply about what sort of AI tools it wanted to deliver to users that would elevate the Galaxy S24 above the basic smartphone experience we’ve come to expect. “We have to make sure that customers will see some tangible benefits from their day-to-day use of the product or technologies that we develop,” he said.
Conversely, there’s also some crossover in AI tools between devices because of the partners these phone-makers share. As the maker of Android, the operating system used by almost all non-Apple phones, Google is experimenting heavily with AI features. These will be available across phones made by Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Honor and a host of others.
Google used its presence at MWC this year to talk about some of its recently introduced AI features, like Circle to Search, a visual search tool that lets you draw a circle around something you see on screen to search for it.
The other, less visible partner that phone-makers have in common is chipmaker Qualcomm, whose chips were in an entire spectrum of devices at MWC this year. Its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, announced late in 2023, can be found in many of the phones that are now running on-device generative AI.
It’s been only a year since Qualcomm first showed a basic demo of what generative AI on a phone might look like. Now phones packing this technology are on sale, said Ziad Asghar, who leads the company’s AI product roadmap.
“From our perspective, we are the enablers,” said Asghar. “Each and every one of our partners can choose to commercialize with unique experiences that they think are more important for their end consumer.”
At MWC, the company launched its AI Hub, which gives developers access to 75 plug-and-play generative AI models that they can pick and choose from to apply to their products. That number will grow, and it means any company making devices with Qualcomm chips will be able to add all sorts of AI features.
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AI is changing how we interact with our devices
AI enhancements to our phones are all well and good, but already we’re seeing artificial intelligence being used in ways that have the power to totally change how we interact with our devices — as well as potentially changing what devices we choose to own.
In addition to enabling companies to bring AI to their existing device lines, Qualcomm’s tech is powering concept phones like the T Phone, created by Deutsche Telekom and Brain.AI. Together, these two have tapped Qualcomm’s chipset to totally reimagine your phone’s interface, creating an appless experience that responds to you based on your needs and the task you’re trying to accomplish and generates, on the fly, whatever you see on screen as you go.
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In the demo I saw at MWC, AI showed it has the potential to put an end to the days of constant app-swapping as you’re trying to make a plan or complete a task. “It really changes the way we interface with devices and becomes a lot more natural,” said Asghar.
But, he said, that’s only the beginning. He’d like to see the same concept applied to mixed reality glasses. He sees the big benefit of the AI in allowing new inputs through gesture, voice and vision that don’t necessarily rely on us tapping on a screen. “Technology is much more interesting when it’s not really in your face, but it’s solving the problems for you in an almost invisible manner,” he said.
His words reminded me of a moment in the MWC keynote presentation when Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis asked an important question. “In five-plus years time, is the phone even really going to be the perfect form factor?” said Hassabis. “There’s all sorts of amazing things to be invented.”
In my demo with the AI Pin — a wearable device with no screen that you interact with through voice and touch — it was clear to me that AI is creating space for experimentation. It’s allowing us to ask what may succeed the phone as the dominant piece of technology in our lives.
Link to the rest at CNet and thanks to F. for the tip.
It’s smartphones today, it’ll be TVs, tablets, and glasses next. These days pretty much everything electric is effectively a computer. Next that computer will be running some form of “AI” software.
Pretty much everything that can host a Qualcomm chip, a mike and a speaker, and a camera, will get added features. Cheap.
Bear in mind that “AI” gadgets doesn’t mean a full blown LLM chatbot. Rather, much improved software coded by a LLM to perform a limited set of sophisticated features. Phone cameras are both a precursor and an example of the kind of things to expect; automatic exposure setting, centering, sharpening, etc. (Anybody remember the photo analysis scene in BLADERUNNER?)
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3711844/2024-will-be-the-year-of-ai-glasses.html
As to the glasses, one clear option is GPS. Another is TTS; look at something and the glasses will read it to you. Or play music, read an audio book, route a phone call to a pocketed phone.
We might even see useful pens, rings, pendants, and wrist devices. Some might even stick.
Future phones may not look like anything we’d currently recognize as a phone.
(Oh, and the glasses in question are the frames. The lenses can be anything needed.)