AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the buzzword in tech right now. Whilst it has been around for a few years, it’s place in the world has become prevalent over the past year. With virtual assistants in the home and apps helping us on the day-to-day, it is clear this area of tech is growing. Now, we are seeing phones that have AI as a dedicated feature. In this article we look at how smartphones already use AI and what features you may not know about.
Voice recognition and voice commands
Voice recognition is a feature that many of us are familiar with on our smartphones. From the likes of Siri and Google Assistant, we can utilise AI to ask our phones questions and give commands. It works by using technology to recognise our voice so when we ask a command it will respond. If someone who has not registered their voice with the phone tries to give a command it is less to recognise it. Once it has recognised our voice it will translate this into an action within the system, such as activating a particular setting or doing a web search.
Predictive text and autocorrect
Did you know that auto-correct and predictive text is powered by AI? Your phone uses online dictionaries to recognise words and automatically change it to the correct spelling for you. The AI on your phone learns from your frequently used words and phrases so it can predict which words you may be trying to spell and types it for you. This can mean that there may be times you are spelling a word a certain way, such as an abbreviation, so your phone learns your pattern of spelling and may begin auto-correcting to the abbreviation.
Automatic camera enhancement
If you are a keen photographer, you may be interested in the AI powered automatic camera enhancement that many smartphones use. AI enables the camera to detect faces and objects, meaning if you are struggling to get your camera to focus on an area then the AI can help to achieve this focal point. AI camera enhancement also analyses the image for you and can apply settings such as exposure and even filters to get the perfect short. Although some may see these tools as AI "destroying” the artform of photography, for keen amateur snapper, this helps to improve the overall quality through the lighting and colour enhancement.
Smartphone security and facial recognition
A lot of smartphones now use biometric data in the form of facial recognition. This is where your phone scans your face using the camera and convert this to data. This is commonly used in cases of security where to unlock your phone or access apps the phone will need to verify your face to confirm it is you before opening. This means if someone else tries to unlock the phone it will not be recognised and will need to resort to inputting a passcode instead.
What else can AI do?
Depending on your model of phone, you may find exclusive AI features available that upgrade your user experience. It’s likely that smartphones will add additional AI features in the future.