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Oppo shared its vision around artificial intelligence (AI) on Wednesday, highlighting its efforts in bringing AI innovations to users and its future plans. Earlier this year, the company introduced several AI features to select smartphones in China with the ColorOS New Year Edition update. Soon after, it introduced these features globally, and expanded it to more devices. The Chinese smartphone maker also announced the establishment of its AI Centre in Shenzhen, from where the company will be driving its AI innovation.
Oppo to Bring Several AI Features to Its Smartphones
The company said in a press release that it will bring AI features to smartphones across price points by the end of 2024. This includes existing AI features, as well as ones that will be announced in the coming months. If the company is to be believed, the number of GenAI features could cross the 100 mark. It has also set up an AI R&D Centre to develop proprietary technologies.
Oppo also announced that it has filed more than 5,399 AI patents worldwide. The list includes 3,796 patents just in AI imaging. Additionally, it is collaborating with tech giants such as Google and Microsoft who are leading the AI race, and chipset manufacturers such as MediaTek and Qualcomm. Some of the areas of AI it is looking to develop capabilities include image processing, computer vision, speech technology, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning.
Highlighting its efforts, the Chinese brand said that it has been developing its own large language models (LLMs) since 2020 and is actively developing large vision models and multimodal models. It also claims to have deployed an LLM with 7 billion parameters directly to smartphones.
“Oppo has pledged not to employ user data for training models and established a robust data security and privacy protection system backed by third-party certifications, end-to-end encryption, and confidential computing technology to ensure user data remains private,” the company said on Wednesday.
Oppo Collaborating With Microsoft, Google for AI Features
The company is working with Microsoft to bring a natural voice and text conversion experience. It is leveraging Microsoft’s Fast Transcription and Neural TTS technologies for this. Oppo said it is already using Azure AI Speech Service for its audio recording transcription feature.
The collaboration is also aimed at building a connection with desktop AI and mobile AI. The company claims that Oppo’s smartphone users will be able to use the desktop version of Copilot to generate content, translate text messages and search addresses on their smartphones via a connected PC.
With MediaTek, the Chinese smartphone brand is developing chipsets with dedicated AI processing units which also known as Neural Procesing Units (NPUs) and accelerators. The company is working with the chipmaker to optimise the AI features for its hardware and software stack. Notably, it is also leveraging Google’s Gemini LLM to power some of the AI features for its flagship devices.
