Over the past year, artificial intelligence has attained a much more significant role in our smartphones. Be it the Google Assistant you question when you’re in doubt or the social feeds you check on the daily, AI has found a home for itself everywhere around us. But, what do market experts think of its reach in the near future?
Gartner’s AI Research
Even hardware makers have decided to adopt the tech and bake AI capabilities into their devices to optimize and improve the user experience. Gartner’s latest research points out that this is just a beginning and AI will become “a critical product differentiator for smartphone vendors” in the coming years.
Gartner predicts that 80% of smartphones shipped by 2022 will surely have on-device AI capabilities, which will help phone makers acquire and retain customers going forward. It currently stands at a mere 10% and is limited to premium phones such as Huawei’s Mate 10 Pro and Google Pixel 2. Continuing to talk about the same, Gartner’s research director CK Lu says,
Future AI capabilities will allow smartphones to learn, plan and solve problems for users. This isn’t just about making the smartphone smarter, but augmenting people by reducing their cognitive load. However, AI capabilities on smartphones are still in very early stages.
The research report then delves into the specific use-cases for AI, which will have a much larger impact on user experience for smartphones over the next 4-5 years. We’ve already witnessed quite a few of them being applied in the current scenario, but at a rather niche level. However, the smartphones in the future are expected to combine 2 or more AI capabilities to hopefully present us with advanced and buttery smooth experiences on smartphones and mobile devices.
Expected AI Advancements
Let’s take the example of natural language recognition or augmented reality, we’re on the cusp of a breakthrough as both of these technologies are garnering interest and improving with each passing day. Now, if you fast forward four years, what do you see?
Smartphones won’t return the much-hated ‘I don’t understand that’ answer to the queries instead, they will one step ahead and help you out intuitively based on the cues it gathers. Such as, it may ask you to order a jacket when the temperatures are on a steep decline. As for AR technology, it will become more widely available and will have found its way to even more useful applications such as user data collection or illness detection.
Another popular application of AI is something we’ve seen on Google Pixel 2 devices and it is gathering a lot of praise from the whole tech community. Yes, you’ve guessed it right. It is personal photography that’ll benefit from AI and automatically show beautified and high-quality pictures of yourself. This technology will only get better with upcoming advancements in AI, says Gartner.
Further, there are two use-cases that especially stood out to me in the research report. AI is expected to come in handy for personal profiling and content censorship over the coming years.
Here, the former means that AI would be able to automatically detect your behavioral patterns and personal activities to build an intelligent profile that will help them adapt based on the surroundings. The latter, on the other hand, will help in the improvement of assistants as they approach the smartness levels of Tony Stark’s Jarvis. The continuous listening ability can come in handy as under:
For example, a smartphone hears a user snoring, then triggers the user’s wristband to encourage a change in sleeping positions.
Thus, simply put, Gartner’s research confirms that AI’s presence will only increase in our lives and it’ll become the centerpiece of technological development over the coming years.
And it could be such that, we will spend most of our time with an AI assistant that’ll be aware of what we’re doing and what happens next. The scenario could be similar to the Hollywood movie, Her, which could surely be exciting – well, at least for some. Are you ready to welcome the flood of AI-based innovation? I sure am.
