Innovative ai

Taking artificial intelligence offline makes the P20 a true pro

Several phones currently on the market use artificial intelligence technology, but in most cases this is accessed via the Cloud and requires an internet connection. Information from a smartphone is typically sent to a server to be processed, and then an answer is received. Huawei, however, has taken the broad applications of internet-assisted AI and created the world’s first built-in smartphone AI computing platform, the Kirin 970. This AI processing chip houses a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that takes inspiration from the way our brains learn.

Recognition is one of the fundamental purposes of AI, whether it’s your voice, face or location. The way the Kirin 970 does this is via its NPU. Images, for example, are recognised by its knowledge base, known as an inference engine. That image is then processed and compared with its knowledge base for recognition and an answer is given. So if you were looking at a dog through the camera, for example, it would analyse that image at between 17–33 frames per second and tell you you’re looking at a dog.

It might seem strange to be impressed with a phone that can tell you what you’re already seeing, but when that then affects camera settings or can give information about what you are looking at, it becomes increasingly advantageous. This high level of recognition and knowledge makes the potential for the chip boundless. In a test demonstration, the Kirin 970 processed 2,000 images per minute. This method of learning is also applied to facial and voice recognition.