Are AI Phones the Future of Smartphones?

With AI promising to revolutionize entire industries, it’s no wonder that consumer technology companies are working hand-in-hand with chipset makers to bring AI to consumer’s pockets.

“AI as a milestone is bigger in mobile than in PC,” says Rami Osman, Director for Business Development Middle East and Africa at Taiwan-based semiconductor company MediaTek. He stresses that, as the AI phone market grows, the technology behind it must evolve quickly to keep up with consumer expectations.

The global fabless semiconductor company MediaTek is the largest provider of smartphone chipsets globally and holds the number one position in multiple consumer electronics, mobility, and connectivity industries, enabling nearly two billion connected devices a year. The market leader in developing systems-on-a-chip (SoC) for smartphones, home entertainment, connectivity, and IoT products, MediaTek’s innovation has positioned it as a driving market force in several key technology areas, including highly power-efficient smartphone technologies, automotive solutions, and a broad range of advanced multimedia products such as smartphones, tablets, digital televisions, 5G, Voice Assistant Devices (VAD), and wearables.

To ensure that its chipsets can support evolving consumer needs, MediaTek works closely with consumer electronics manufacturers like OPPO to build technology that can support increasingly powerful--and efficient--devices.

As the AI phone market grows, companies like OPPO are integrating AI into their phones. Director of AI Technology Strategic Planning at OPPO Darren Chen notes that, while AI has been around for decades, the biggest milestone in consumer use of AI--particularly in smartphones--was the explosion of Generative AI (GenAI) in late 2022.

Smartphones are the perfect carriers for AI functionalities due to their comprehensive input and output capacities and their ever-increasing hardware capabilities, particularly in AI computing power. As a result, smartphones have a crucial role to play in making AI technology accessible to all and smartphone OEMs will be key drivers in this process.

“From OPPO’s perspective, the third stage in the evolution of the smartphone is the AI phone. When evolution happens, there is not one single technology that makes it happen, but Generative AI is a key motivation at this stage. AI is supported by the technology landing on the smartphone, including 5G connections and SoCs, which allow hybrid AI to work on smartphones,” says Chen.

Both Osman and Chen agree that the most recent wave of AI is a major milestone in the development of smartphones in the past decade.

“IDC predicts that, by the end of this year, there will be 170 million AI phones in the global market. OPPO’s strategy is to make AI phones accessible to everyone across all OPPO product lines to democratize the technology. We expect that 50 million users will have OPPO AI smartphones by the end of this year,” says Chen.

The challenges of bringing AI to smartphones

Chen notes that, while Generative AI has changed users’ expectations in the past couple of years, the technology has been integrated into smartphones for years, allowing users to do more complex tasks.

According to Chen, the evolution of hardware and software will change human-mobile interactions, allowing users to install AI agents on their phones to help them process, plan, and use AI tools in their daily lives. This, Chen believes, will create the next generation of the AI personal assistant.

“I think that, in the next five to ten years, we will see a truly AI phone,” says Chen. He notes that, to support the rapidly evolving technology, the hardware architecture behind phones will need to be increasingly efficient, with significant advancements in SoCs to support on-device AI.

Osman agrees that Generative AI is changing how we interact with devices. “Everyone is still trying to identify the hero use cases. But I think the major milestone in the past two years was large language models running on the Edge with processors by MediaTek and other companies,” Osman says.

As a leader at MediaTek, which designs the tech behind consumer electronics, Osman is acutely aware of the challenges of integrating AI into the pockets of everyday users.

“One thing that consumers might not know, but that we feel as technology players, is the complexity of AI models. There are too many Large Language Models (LLMs) for Generative AI, which increases the memory load on the AI Processing Unit or APU. We all need to work together to standardize and streamline models, or else devices may become bloated,” he says.

“We have to keep pushing the boundaries of R&D to keep smartphones within the same size, the same form factor, and the same price,” says Osman.