If Google has anything to do about it, your next smartphone may be able to see and understand you, as if it were human.
The Web giant has partnered with chip designer Movidius to accelerate the adoption of these types of deep learning capabilities within mobile devices. As part of the partnership, announced Thursday, Google will use Movidius's processors to power its advanced neural computation engine on mobile devices and in turn help the chip maker with its neural network technology.
Movidius said the partnership may lead to future mobile devices that can actually understand images and audio "with incredible speed and accuracy," offering a more personal computing experience than ever before.
"Movidius's mission is to bring visual intelligence to devices so that they can understand the world in a more natural way," the company's CEO, Remi El-Ouazzane, said in a statement. "This partnership with Google will allow us to accelerate that vision in a tangible way."
Google will use Movidius's flagship MA2450 chip, touted as the only commercial solution on the market today that can perform complex neural network computations in "ultra-compact" form factors.
"What Google has been able to achieve with neural networks is providing us with the building blocks for machine intelligence, laying the groundwork for the next decade of how technology will enhance the way people interact with the world," Blaise Agüera y Arcas, head of Google's machine intelligence group in Seattle, said in a statement. "By working with Movidius, we're able to expand this technology beyond the data center and out into the real world, giving people the benefits of machine intelligence on their personal devices."
Movidius is one of Google's partners in Project Tango; in 2014, the Tango prototype phone packed Movidius's Myriad 1 vision processor platform.