Smartphone camera apps could soon do more than just capture images. Software integrated with a new line of smartphone chips will be capable of recognizing, say, a cat or city skyline in a photo, and tagging pictures of your friends with their names.+
The chip maker Qualcomm announced last week that it will bundle the software with its next major chip for mobile devices. The technology, which Qualcomm calls Zeroth, could make sophisticated machine learning more common on mobile devices. As well as processing images, the Zeroth software is designed to allow phones to recognize speech or other sounds, and to learn to spot patterns of activity from a device’s sensors.
