OPPO is committed to making AI available on smartphones across all price points by the end of 2024. The brand has set up an AI R&D Centre to develop proprietary technologies and is collaborating with Google, Microsoft and chipset manufacturers such as MediaTek and Qualcomm to deliver more AI features for everyday life.
In February this year, OPPO announced the establishment of the OPPO AI Centre in Shenzhen to centralise resources and support the systematic development of AI capabilities in areas such as image processing, computer vision, speech technology, natural language processing, and machine learning. OPPO has pledged not to employ user data for training models and established a robust data security and privacy protection system backed by third-party certifications, end-to-end encryption, and confidential computing technology to ensure user data remains private.
IDC’s latest research report “Time to Democratise the Impact of AI Tech” reinforces the significant potential of this market. According to IDC, shipments for AI phones in the sub-US$1000 segment are expected to grow by 250% in 2024 to reach 35 million units. Generative AI will increasingly enter everyday life via phones to enhance experiences across entertainment, mobile officing, and more.
Since 2020, OPPO has pioneered the development of its own Large Language Models (LLMs) and has been active in large vision models and multimodal technology. More importantly, OPPO is the first smartphone brand to deploy an LLM with 7 billion parameters directly on the device.
With its advanced AI technologies, OPPO has rolled out over 100 generative AI capabilities to its phones this year and has filed over 5,399 AI patents worldwide, including 3,796 patents for AI imaging. OPPO has consistently invested in technology research and development, delving into key technological fields such as flash charging with SuperVOOC, imaging algorithms that can recognise age, sex, and skin tones, as well as smart charging with its Battery Health Engine that prolongs battery life over the span of the device.
OPPO’s new centre aims to strengthen its AI capabilities and explore a broad range of user-centric AI products and features that will enable it to bring users the latest experiences at the forefront of AI.
To strengthen the AI ecosystem for its smartphones, OPPO has formed strategic partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and MediaTek.
“With our relentless efforts and commitment, OPPO aims to make AI phones accessible to everyone,” said Billy Zhang, President of Overseas MKT, Sales, and Service at OPPO. “For the first time in the industry, OPPO is bringing generative AI to all product lines. By the end of this year, we expect to bring generative AI features to about 50 million users.”
“Next-gen AI Smartphones will represent a major transformative stage in the mobile phone industry”, said Pete Lau, Chief Product Officer of OPPO. “We are dedicated to becoming a contributor and promoter of AI smartphones. We look forward to working with our industry partners to jointly drive the innovation of the mobile phone industry and reshape the intelligent experience of mobile phones.”
OPPO’s flagship series will feature the Google Gemini family LLMs, to bring AI features such as AI Toolbox including AI Writer and AI Recording Summary. The AI Writer provides content suggestions, such as sentence completions, word choices, and grammar corrections to enhance the overall quality of the content. Additionally, this tool supports seamless language translation, enabling content creation in multiple languages. The AI Record Summary efficiently auto-summarises meetings, transcripts, podcasts, etc, allowing users to grasp a document’s essence without extensive reading. It also highlights important information such as dates, names, and specific terms to ensure critical details are not overlooked.
OPPO is working with Microsoft to bring a more efficient, accurate and natural voice and text conversion experience with Microsoft Fast Transcription and Neural TTS technologies. With the new fast transcription feature of Azure AI Speech Service, OPPO has been able to create a smooth user experience for audio recording transcription. Additionally, OPPO’s collaboration with the Redmond-based giant will strengthen the connection between desktop AI and smartphones. Within this year, OPPO users will be able to use DESKTOP Copilot to generate content, translate text messages, and search addresses on their smartphones via a connected PC.
OPPO is also collaborating with MediaTek to bring more innovative AI phone experiences to OPPO users. Both chipset manufacturers are developing chipsets with dedicated AI processing units (NPU) and accelerators. OPPO is working with these chipmakers to optimise AI features for its hardware and software stack; this leads to smoother performance and more efficient AI processing on its smartphones. OPPO’s collaboration extends to developing custom AI frameworks tailored to its needs; this allows the brand to leverage the chipmakers’ expertise while creating unique AI features for its devices.
“Generative AI marks a significant milestone in the evolution of artificial intelligence. It brings forth greater creativity, novel possibilities, enhanced technical scalability, and significantly improved efficiency. These factors instil us with confidence as we step into a new era of AI Phones,” stated Nicole Zhang, GM – AI Product at OPPO. “Our deep collaboration with Google Cloud throughout our journey is pivotal. Google Cloud’s open platform capabilities hold profound significance for OPPO’s advancement of AI phones.”
Moving forward, the transition from smartphones to AI phones will be a long-term evolution that continuously transforms the mobile experience. “We believe that the intelligent OS will be embedded with AI Agents and support multimodal interaction, meanwhile the third-party services will be provided more flexibly. This will result in a full-stack transformation and ecosystem restructuring of AI phones.” Nicole added.
