Oppo launching powerful AI tools on affordable smartphones

Oppo has announced plans to bring powerful new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to its upcoming smartphones — including some of its budget and mid-range models.

The company shared its AI strategy during an event in London on Monday, 3 June 2024, where it also revealed the partners it was working with to help integrate generative AI tools in its smartphones.

Oppo AI Product general manager Nicole Zhang explained there were four fundamental characteristics of next-gen AI phones:

• Efficient computing
• A perception of the real world
• The ability to self-learn
• Creativity

Oppo has over 5,000 patents relating to AI technologies and already offers a handful of AI capabilities in smartphone software on some of its devices, including for its cameras and general performance optimisation.

Its Obert language model has been in testing since 2020 and supports over 100 generative AI features in the Find X smartphone. Obert uses a hybrid model that combines on-device and cloud processing.

The 7-billion parameter model peaks at 3.9GB of RAM usage and takes up 3.5GB of storage, making it highly efficient.

Oppo’s AI software has enabled users to be more productive with fast transcription, including real-time translation, and enhanced cross-device collaboration between desktop AI and phones.

For creatives, the software assists with photo editing and personalised creation through multimodal generation and motion generation technologies.

One example of this is the AI Eraser, which lets users remove unwanted objects from their photos and quickly generate missing content. Oppo said people used this tool about 15 times per day.

Oppo’s AI Eraser in action

Oppo’s next generation of AI smartphones will begin with the Reno 12 Pro series, followed by the next Find X model.

In addition to Oppo’s own AI software, these will support Google’s Gemini large language models, enabling features like AI Writer and AI Recording Summary.

Zhang said the combination of Oppo and Google’s software would cause a full-stack transformation and ecosystem restructuring of AI phones.

In addition to Google, Oppo is also collaborating with chip manufacturer MediaTek to optimise chip storage and compute efficiency on flagship processors.

While a selection of manufacturers also offer next-gen AI capabilities on their flagships, Oppo is expanding these capabilities to more affordable smartphones, including its A series smartphones.

In cases where a chipset is not powerful enough to support on-device AI processing, an Oppo smartphone will instead use cloud-based processing.

Nicole Zhang, Oppo AI Product general manager, speaking during the company’s AI strategy event in London on Monday, 3 June 2024

Boom in affordable next-gen AI smartphones

The International Data Corporation (IDC) believes more affordable AI-equipped smartphones will see substantial growth in the coming year.

According to IDC EMEA devices vice president Francisco Jeronimo, 88% of smartphones being used in May 2024 were priced below $1,000 (R18,890).

The IDC forecasted next-gen AI smartphones will grow 250% from 10 million to 35 million units in the next year, helping to democratise the tech.

Oppo is aiming for 50 million of its smartphones to feature AI technologies by the end of 2024.