**Note: Domestic mobile phone manufacturers have applied AI capabilities to their products. (Visual China).
Reporter Ni Hao, Wang Dong, and Ding Ling, special correspondent of this newspaper in South Korea.
Editor's note: Just after the Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon, traditional mobile phone manufacturers are fully committed to the new era created by AI in the surging tide of artificial intelligence (AI). The industry believes that AI mobile phones will become the third stage of the mobile phone industry after feature phones and smartphones, and the consensus that 2024 will become the first year of AI mobile phones seems to be continuously strengthened in the industry. What is an AI phone? What changes will it bring to the industry landscape?
Users experience more AI features.
Disruptive applications enabled by generative AI are bringing mobile users to a new era of experience. When a reporter from the Global Times experienced a large mobile phone store in Beijing, he found that AI functions have become the main promotional content of many mainstream brand flagship mobile phones. According to a foreign mobile phone brand, its mobile phones are equipped with AI functions that can provide a better experience for scenarios such as real-time translation during calls, photo taking**, intelligent search, and document writing. For example, the real-time translation function under AI technology can support real-time translation of 13 languages in the process of message sending, and users only need to draw a circle on the words and images in applications such as social **, and AI will immediately present the corresponding search results.
Guo Tianxiang, a senior analyst at International Data Corporation (IDC) in China, told the Global Times that with the blessing of AI, the future AI mobile phone may be the exclusive companion of users, and accompany users to grow by learning their habits. Human-computer communication and interaction are more natural and direct, and AI mobile phones will intelligently provide users with a complete set of solutions. Liu Zuohu, chief product officer of OPPO, told the Global Times that the AI mobile phone interactive experience will usher in a comprehensive innovation, supporting sharper and more accurate natural semantic understanding, and having stronger self-learning capabilities, so as to achieve more accurate intention judgment and more intuitive interaction. AI phones will also have some creative capabilities.
In the recent publicity of AI mobile phones by domestic and foreign manufacturers, they are emphasizing the functions of products that are different from traditional smartphones. For example, the Find X7 released by OPPO is the first mobile phone that can apply a 7 billion parameter large language model on the device side. Samsung's S24 series mobile phones integrate AI search function, AI translation function, AI ** generation technology and so on. The vivo S18 series is equipped with a "blue heart model", which can support users to find files, compose poems and lyrics, read cultural and creative pictures, summarize content, solve difficult problems, organize material frameworks, etc. Honor MagicOS 8The "magic model" brought by 0 has functions such as smart filming, gallery semantic search, and arbitrary doors. Guo Rui, chief marketing officer of Honor Terminal***, said that the future operating system is an AI-enabled operating system, which will break the boundaries of devices, applications and operating systems.
The concept of AI mobile phones is in the pursuit.
Xiang Ligang, an expert in the communications industry, told the Global Times that the capabilities of AI have long been applied to smartphones, "in the improvement of the ability to take pictures, the management of power supply and network capabilities, and the improvement of application speed, we can see the role of AI. ”
In fact, the AI mobile phone heat wave has been set off in the mobile phone industry since the second half of last year. So far, almost all major mobile phone companies in the world can't wait to incorporate AI functions into new product promotions. The collective entry of mainstream enterprises is making AI mobile phones open a new era, and the judgment has been agreed by some experts. Guo Tianxiang told the Global Times that in recent years, the development of mobile phones has entered a bottleneck period, with serious hardware convergence and a lack of new "killer applications" and new use scenarios in software. The implantation of AI large models is expected to trigger a new interactive revolution between mobile phones and users, which can bring consumers a new experience and reflect product differentiation. Liu Zuohu said that a new era of the mobile phone industry has arrived, and AI mobile phones represent the innovation of an industrial ecology, and the entire ecology will be different from the present in the future.
Chinese smartphone manufacturers, aiming to reshape the industry, are accelerating the AI-based adoption of their phones. South Korea's "North Korea" reported on the 20th that Chinese mobile phone companies have a "sensitive sense of smell" and rapid action for AI. According to the report, as a latecomer in the smartphone industry, Chinese mobile phone manufacturers expect AI to be an innovative technology that will change the existing market map.
Smart devices will benefit.
The industry changes caused by technological progress are drawing a magnificent blueprint for the development of the mobile phone industry. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), global smartphone shipments in 2023 were 11700 million units, a new low in 10 years. According to a report released by market research agency TechInsights, the global smartphone replacement rate will fall to 23 in 20235%, the replacement cycle is up to 51 months. The industry believes that AI mobile phones are expected to bring a wave of "replacement waves". IDC expects global shipments of next-generation AI phones to reach 1700 million units. In the Chinese market, the share of AI mobile phones will rise rapidly after 2024 to reach 1500 million units, with a market share of more than 50%.
In this wave, the mobile phone hardware industry chain is expected to benefit first. Liu Zuohu believes that in the field of hardware platforms, AI mobile phones' strong perception of the real world and heterogeneous inference computing capabilities will become more important performance requirements. Mobile devices associated with mobile phones are also expected to benefit. Generative AI applications are expected to be a hot topic at Mobile World Congress 2024 (MWC 2024), which is scheduled to open in Barcelona on February 26. Major global manufacturers will focus on AI-related hardware and software products at the exhibition. Honor will release the first AI laptop, Honor told the "Global Times" reporter that the future AI will be a human-centered AI in all fields, not only to mobile phones, but also to personal computers, watches, cars, TVs and other terminal devices.
South Korea's "Daily Economy" said on 21** that Samsung will continue to expand its AI product range in the future after the launch of the Galaxy S24. Roh Tae-moon, president of Samsung Electronics' MX Division, believes that many new ideas and concepts will continue to be introduced as the technology becomes more mature in the future. Mobile devices are the most important starting point for AI, and if AI technology is applied to wearable products, a new smart health experience can be created. ▲
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