Transcript of The AI already in your phone | BBC News

We're getting used to AI being able to do uncannily human things, chatting with us, creating pictures and videos. But so far, all of this AI has used a lot of computing power. Even if you've been doing these things on your phone, it's been massive supercomputers in the cloud that have doing the work and then sending the results down to your device. See, it turns out that the chips these computers were already fitted with, called graphics processing units, GPUs, are also really good at the calculations needed for AI. It's also the reason why GPU manufacturer NVIDIA has risen to be one of the most valuable companies in the world.

But in the last year or so, we've seen the arrival of a new type of chip, an NPU, Neural Processing Unit. Now, these are specifically made for AI, and because they are smaller than GPUs, it means you can fit them in one of these.

That means that these chips can do some limited AI on your phone. And that's why we started to hear phone manufacturers hyping up their Apple intelligence, Samsung advanced intelligence, and enhanced personal assistance like Siri and Google's Gemini that can have more natural conversations with us. How can I embarrass my sister during a wedding toast, but respectfully? Okay, here's the deal. New honor phones will understand the contents of your messages and open the best app to assist in whatever you've received. If it's an address, for example, it'll open maps. This Samsung phone can now take your handwritten notes, summarize them, and make them into lists.

.

Your phone can translate in real-time. And in fact, Google's new Pixel phones will listen to your phone calls and summarize them for you in text form after you hang up.

One of the most recognizably AI things you can do these days is mess around with your photos.

So if you want something removed from your shot, including you, where you can tap it, erase it, and the phone will fill in the gap with a pretty good approximation of the background. So now a few roadworks won't spoil your holiday snaps, and a random photobomber won't ruin that otherwise beautiful moment. Remember, though, generative AI can have its moments, so don't rely on it to understand exactly what you're after.

Okay, it got rid of the bin and put another bin there.

As well as removing things, you can also do completely the opposite, adding things in that weren't there in the first place. It's not just phones that are getting smarter, mind you.

This is the latest Microsoft Surface Pro, one of the new Copilot Plus brand of PCs and tablets with onboard NPUs. Now, this uses the inbuilt AI in a number of ways.

First, would you believe good old Microsoft Paint has had a generative AI upgrade. Now you can be a terrible artist and no one need ever know. Paint's AI Assistant co-creator will take the most pathetic of drawing springs and use it as a guide to come up with something far more artistic. You can dial the amount of AI flamboyance up and down, but although your sketch gives you some control over the end result, it can still be pretty unpredictable.

Okay, I'll leave it as an exercise for the viewer to decide which is the most pressing issue. Is it the text in the tree or the trunk hanging out of the ear?

These PCs will also add some pretty subtle AI tweaks to your camera app.

Now, you know when you're on a video call and the other person's eyes are not quite looking at you because they're actually looking at their screen and not the webcam at the top here. Well, this computer will raise your eyes up to make it look like you're maintaining eye contact with the other person. Now, the effect is really, really subtle, but maybe if I turn it on and off, you can see it artificially tweaking the top of my eyes. There it is. Off, on, off. It's so subtle and ever so slightly freaky. And then there's possibly the most far reaching use of AI and large language models that I've seen so far. It's called recall.

This is like a photographic memory for your PC. Every few seconds, it takes a screenshot of what that you're doing. And if much later on, you vaguely remember something that you saw that you wanted to find again, you can describe it to the onboard assistance, and the large language model will go looking amongst all of the thousands of screenshots for things that might match.

Now, I know what you're thinking. If your computer is recording everything that you do all the time, huge privacy alarms. Am I right? That is why Microsoft is going to great lengths to reassure users that everything to do with recall stays on the device. Nothing goes anywhere near the cloud. You can also turn recall on and off for different websites, and this is also the reason why this feature is still being finalized and hasn't been rolled out yet, because this is one that Microsoft has to get right.

Google's launched a similar feature for its pixel phones. Here, you have to manually take a screenshot, after which it becomes search in the same way. Again, everything happens on device to keep everything private.

In order to work well, AI needs to consume a lot of training data. I mean, in an ideal world, it would swallow everything about everyone. But that is something that people are starting to get worried about. And I think these new onboard neural processing units are partly there to allay those concerns. They can't match the power of AI in in the cloud, but they do allow certain AI functions without your data being shared with the rest of the world. It means that your personal assistant can stay a little bit more personal..