Technology
Artificial Intelligence Takes the Lead for Half a Year
As is shown in the latest research report of IDC, a market research institution, the global smartphone market is continuously in the downturn period in the third quarter of 2017 since it begun to sink in the second quarter. The shipment of global smartphone in the third quarter is 373.1 million, merely increasing by 2.7% compared with the 363.4 million of 2016.
The reasons for the decelerated growth of global smartphone market are that, on one hand, the market has accessed into the plateau and that, on the other hand, due to the innovation deficiency in the whole industry, the products are highly homogeneous. Taking the all screen as an example, cell phone manufacturers turned to all screen phones one after another since the second half of 2017, but effective technological barrier haven’t formed because of the mature all screen industrial chain, and within only one month’s time, the all screens of high-end cell phones like iPhone X have rapidly become the standard configuration of phones priced around one thousand yuan. The smartphone industry needs ground-breaking innovation, and with the coming of artificial intelligence(AI) era, AI will become the max variate for driving the increase of the mobile phone industry, making the smartphone industry that is floundering as a whole see the hope of disruptive innovation.
Honor Becomes the Glass-breaker of the Smartphone Industry Honor View10 Starts the “AI Speed Revolution”
On November 28th, Honor launched its artificial intelligence phone Honor View10, saying that the Honor View10 equipped with AI chip will spark the “AI Speed Revolution” for the smartphone industry. Succeeding iPhone X and Huawei Mate10, Honor View10 is also another smartphone carrying the special AI processing chip.
“The reform brought by AI to the mobile phone industry has just begun. The more deep-seated meaning of AI speed revolution lies in that the traditional methods rely on the hardware performance improvement and software optimization while AI phones rely on AI accelerating to realize real subversion. In the conventional sense, the speediness of the phone is by continuously enhancing the processing speed of the hardware and optimizing the fluency of the software, yet the speed increase has reached the bottleneck. AI speeding is realized through understanding users’ thoughts and optimizing the operating procedures, thus the speed is substantially promoted in comparison with traditional operations, which is the dual-subversion of idea and practice,” said Zhao Ming, president of Honor.
So far, one criterion to judge whether a smartphone has the capacity of artificial intelligence is to see whether it is equipped with AI chip, because in terms of the end-to-side artificial intelligence, only independent AI chip has the computing power for the small amount of big data related to processing artificial intelligence. In 2017, among the smartphone industry, it is iPhone and Huawei that have made exploration in the AI chip field. iPhone has researched and developed the A11 bionic artificial intelligent chip and applied the technology to the latest launched new product of iPhone X. Huawei has launched the world’s first artificial intelligence processor Kylin 970 chip internally installed with the Network Processing Unit(NPU), which helps improve the phone’s capacity on image recognition, voice interaction and smart shoot. At present, the Kylin 970 chip has been applied to Huawei Mate10 and Honor View10.
For the ordinary consumers, the biggest change brought by the smartphone equipped with AI chip is that it can make them become “experts” on a certain field in a short time. With the help of AI, even ordinary green hands can have a good command of the mobile phone applications that need specialized knowledge. Let’s take the photographing capacity of Honor View10 for example, through studying and processing large amount of data model, the smartphone applies users’ understanding for various kinds of photographing scenes to the phone, and when users are taking a picture, the parameter setting provided by the phone is basically no different with that of specialized persons. Therefore, even users not quite good at photographing can shoot pictures of professional level by means of Honor View10.
The emergence of smartphones like iPhone X, Huawei Mate10 and Honor View10 also means that the phone industry has entered the first year of the AI phones era, but AI phones are still faced with great challenges, among which the foremost one is AI ecology. In order to make users feel the revolutionary changes that artificial intelligence brings to phones, it is necessary that they can directly feel that each APP they download is different from the past, which means that the thousands of developers must join in the ecological system of artificial intelligence.
This is right the next step that iPhone and Huawei is planning and preparing, and this ambitious plan is likely to place iPhone, Huawei & Honor in a more leading position than their competitors in the future competition. Different from the currently already mature IOS platform and Android ecological platform, the next ecological platform that will subvert the industry will inevitably present to the artificial intelligence field.
Honor Unfolds the AI Great Uncharted Era Devoted to Building AI New Ecology
Up till now, Honor has established the AI open platform facing all the industry, and it is encouraging all the cooperative partners to build the AI new ecology. As the mobile computing platform of artificial intelligence, the Kylin 970 chip of Huawei and Honor has been open to more developers and cooperative partners. The global developers can make use of the strong AI computing capacity of Kylin 970 to develop more imaginative applications with brand new experience, providing more perfect service for users.
“In the AI era, no company is an “isolated island”, and only by cooperation can the whole industry achieve win-win results. What Honor wants to do is to drive the entire industry to bring more value for users in the artificial intelligence era. “
