Qualcomm brings big brains to mobile devices with deep-learning tool

Qualcomm has talked about putting "silicon brains" in mobile devices and is now providing tools to train smartphones to recognize people, objects, gestures and even emotions.

Phones like Samsung's Galaxy S7 and LG's G5 that use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 chips will get deep-learning capabilities with the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine software development kit, announced on Monday.

The SDK will include a run-time that will exploit chip features so smartphones can accomplish deep-learning tasks like tracking objects and recognizing sounds. The kit could also be used in self-driving cars and autonomous drones and robots.

Computers can already recognize people in images, as seen on Facebook. That recognition is thanks to deep-learning systems, which usually require complex neural networks, thousands of servers and high-performance processors. Qualcomm's SDK doesn't need as many resources and is targeted at the tasks and power-consumption levels available to mobile devices.

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