00:00My name is Rami Othman. I'm the Regional Director of Business Development and Technical Support for MediaTek in the Middle East and Africa region.
00:10MediaTek is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world.
00:14As a matter of fact, we are the largest supplier of smartphone chipsets globally.
00:19I'm Darren Chen. I'm AI Technology Strategy Director at OPPO.
00:30My responsibilities at OPPO is to work with team on AI technology strategy, especially focusing on the roadmap and partnership.
00:40AI features in OPPO Reno12 series, which we have just launched, I think actually there's a lot of AI features.
00:49Just like, you know, the generative AI allows AI to process text, voice, and images as well.
00:59And so all the AI features are related to that.
01:02We released, you know, in our AI toolbox, which was in the smart sidebar, and we have AI speaker, AI summarize, and we can do recording summary.
01:14We can't talk about the AI features in the Reno12 series without talking about the underlying machine, which is the CPU, also known as SoC system on a chip.
01:30But more accurately, I think we should call it the NPU, because it's the Neural Network Processing Unit.
01:39It's the kind of artificial intelligence processing unit that mimics the human's brain way of working, where the neurons in our brains exchange information in electrical signals.
01:57In the past, technologies first used to be, you know, born on the desktop, and then they moved to, you know, laptop, et cetera, and then to mobile.
02:06But now AI suddenly is so important and so effective in our mobile devices.
02:13Everybody is, you know, trying to identify the hero use cases.
02:18And so I think the last two years' major milestone was, you know, large language model running on the edge with the processors by Mediatek and other companies.
02:31This is the era of the AI phone, and this was caused by the, introduced by the technology of generative AI.
02:43And this is, they always, you know, when the evolution happens, there's always not one single technologies can make it happen.
02:54The generative AI is a key motivation, but also we have the SOCs.
03:01They need to support the technology landing on the smartphone, and they need the 5G connections.
03:09They can allow the hybrid AI to work on the smartphone.
03:14So these, I think, are all the milestones that brings the technology to our users.
03:21AI phone market is growing significantly.
03:25At the end of this year, IDC, from IDC's prediction, it will have 170 million AI phones in the global market.
03:37And what OPPO is looking into is, you know, those price segment below U.S. dollar 1,000.
03:48That means most people can benefit from the price segment, the AI phones.
03:55OPPO's strategy is make AI phone accessible to everyone.
04:01So we are trying everything to democratize it.
04:05We are aiming to make generative AI feature accessible to all OPPO smartphone product lines.
04:19The chipset design takes around three years to complete.
04:23If you make a wrong decision, this is disaster.
04:27So our R&D and our regional team keeps always finger on the pulse to sense the consumer requirements,
04:37which we collect not only from the consumers, we collect from the media and press like you,
04:43collect from our design and manufacturing partners like OPPO,
04:47so that we could adjust the chipset design or the chipset specification during the project lifecycle itself.
04:58Moving from the first few generations of the virtual assistant into the next generation, the AI virtual assistant.
05:06What we are trying to do with our partners is to move into a proper AI virtual assistant.
05:12And as Darren was saying, it also relates to the sensors on the device.
05:17And one of the most important sensors of input devices is the microphone.
05:22And we've been all facing problems in the communication with the assistant.
05:26And if they cannot communicate with the assistant properly with our different accents and noise environments,
05:34then even after I don't know how many years now, more than half a decade,
05:38still our relationship with our personal assistant is not so good.
05:42One area that I think should come, maybe the consumers don't know that,
05:48but we feel it as MediaTek and OPPO and other players, technology players, is the complexity of the models.
05:56So the large language models for generative AI in particular are becoming too many.
06:05And the load on the memory and the APU is too high.
06:10So probably we need to work all together to kind of standardize, simplify, to share in that layer.
06:21We have to continue pushing the boundaries of R&D to keep the capability of the smartphone within the same size,
06:32the same form factor and the same price.
06:34If you want to look into the future and try to predict what are the AI capabilities that will come into a smartphone,
06:41as we've been hearing today, the term AI phone is starting to be used.
06:48So maybe it will become the future of the smartphone.
Comments