40 MACWORLD APRIL 2020
iOSCENTRAL XNOR.AI COULD BOOST SIRInot possible on Siri’s scale, at least not
without a little help.
It’s not for a lack of processing power.
Apple’s A-series Bionic chips are certainly
capable. The A13 on the iPhone 11 has
both a faster-than-ever Neural Engine and
a set of machine learning accelerators that
handle more tasks than ever, but it’s still
limited to practical applications specific to
the device, like battery efficiency, power
consumption, and graphics acceleration.
But Xnor.ai’s Edge AI engine could be
the thing that brings everything together.
It’s unlikely that we’ll see any fruits from
Apple’s purchase in the iPhone 12 or even
the iPhone 13, but Apple’s incredible
silicon advancements, coupled with the
kind of on-device AI processing that Xnor.
ai brings, could boost Siri’s capabilities in a
big way. By embedding Edge AI into
Apple’s own chip via the Neural Engine or
a new co-processor, Siri could be faster
and far more capable, learning from what
you do and prioritizing tasks in kind. And it
could all work offline, tapping into the
tremendous power of Apple’s system-on-
chip and doing the work of a powerful
cloud right on the device.
Xnor.ai estimates that Edge AI runs 10
times as fast with 15X memory than cloud-
based systems, and a responsive assistant
dedicated to each specific phone could
finally let Apple build a voice recognition
system with near-perfect accuracy. We’ve
been waiting years for Siri to be able to do
basic things like distinguishing between
different users’ voices, and Edge AI could
bring a great understanding of each user’s
particular cadence. After
all, we already know
that Xnor.ai’s Wyze AI
was able to distinguish
people from pets, so
using it to differentiate
voices shouldn’t be all
that difficult. That alone
would go a long way
toward closing the gap
between Siri and
Google Assistant and
Amazon Alexa. By
building a powerful AI
engine directly on ourThe A13 Bionic chip already has a powerful Neural Engine, but
Edge AI could bring it to the next level.