We use our mobile for many activities everyday – booking plane tickets, placing orders for groceries, chatting, financial transactions, travelling, translating, food delivery, ride-hailing, learning…. so its natural to assume that smartphones will rule this decade starting 2020. But, Baidu Co-founder and Chief, Robin Li thinks otherwise.

According to Li, the decade gone by was an ‘Internet economy’, while the coming decade will be an ‘intelligent economy’, that will be powered by AI.

Li also predicts that in the next 10 years, people will be less and less dependent on mobile phones. Instead, a combination of sensor-driven infrastructure and advanced programming will create an environment of voice-and-visual dominated interface. This technology can answer your questions and serve you and you don’t have to pull out your mobile phone.

AI is already being used to make mobile phones smarter. Voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant use data to understand user’s voice commands and to perform many diverse tasks. Apps also can use image recognition algorithms to identify objects and landmarks around you; just point your phone to an object, or a product, or a landmark, and you get instant information about it on your phone. These apps are also being used for home automation.

AI in your smartphone is enabling professional photography on a mobile phone. AI is used to take better low-light photos, better selfies, and add special effects to photos. Digital zoom is a standard feature in most mobile phone cameras now wherein an AI algorithm, and not just a lens, allows you to zoom in while taking a photo

Facial recognition is available in many mid and high-priced mobile phones. This AI-based technology enables you to unlock your mobile phone using your face. AI and machine learning algorithms are used in facial recognition.

So you have, on the one hand, AI powering your smartphone, allowing it to do more. On the other hand, AI invades every activity of human life and it becomes an integral part of the product, not just an add-on. If you are still using mobile phones in 2029, it will surely be doing stuff it does not do today. What will that be, can you guess?

Categories: Artificial Intelligence, Blog, Technology News