February 25, 2019 – Today at MWC in Barcelona, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, announced that the 4th Generation Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine is supporting on-device AI voice, camera, and AR user experiences on a range of recently announced smartphone models based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform.
Smartphone manufacturers, including Sony and Xiaomi, recently launched flagship smartphones based on Snapdragon 855, all of which take advantage of Qualcomm AI Engine components to accelerate AI features on their devices.
AI features capable with Qualcomm’s AI Engine include dual and single-camera bokeh, secure 3D face authentication, scene detection, super resolution, real-time video segmentation, natural language processing, translation, single-mic noise suppression, and myriad computational photography enhancements that should make shooting photos and videos with higher quality, real-time effects processing easier and more natural for consumers.
“On-device processing enables us to bring Google Lens to users proactively, allowing people to simply point their camera at text, and with a single tap, call a phone number on a takeout menu or send an email right from a flyer,” said Eddie Chung, Director of Product Management for Google Lens. “Through our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, we’ve pushed the boundaries of what can be done on-device through Qualcomm AI Engine and Android NN API.”
Gary Brotman, Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., said: “The volume of Qualcomm Technologies’ mobile OEMs and ecosystem collaborators taking advantage of our 4th gen Qualcomm AI Engine in Snapdragon 855 validates our heterogenous AI product strategy”. He added, “By providing highly optimized on-device AI acceleration and offering a broad suite of software tools and neural network frameworks, Snapdragon 855 is a preferred mobile platform for developers who want to push the boundaries of on-device AI performance and deliver innovative new AI features and applications to flagship smartphones this year.”
Qualcomm Technologies announced its 4th generation multi-core Qualcomm AI Engine as a feature of the Snapdragon 855 in December 2018. According to the company, the AI Engine offers three times the AI performance compared to its previous generation mobile platform. New to the Qualcomm AI Engine in Snapdragon 855 is the Hexagon Tensor Accelerator (HTA) for dedicated AI processing and four Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX), a doubling of vector processing from Qualcomm’s previous generation flagship mobile platform.
Qualcomm Technologies’ AI software collaborators now include:
- Camera: AnyVision, ArcSoft, Face++, Loom.ai, Nalbi, Polarr, Inc., SenseTime, Thundercomm, Uncanny Vision
- Audio/Translation: Youdao, AISpeech, Elevoc, iFlytek
- Gesture: Elliptic Labs, Qeexo
- Augmented Reality: NetEase, SenseTime
- Automotive: Cogent Embedded Technology, Jungo, PathPartner Technologies, ZongMu
Qualcomm Technologies will be showcasing AI demonstrations at MWC 2019 this week.
Image credit: Qualcomm
About the author
Sam Sprigg
Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.
