If a cell phone can essentially see, hear, and detect movement like a person, shouldn't it start to think like a person, too? That's the basis of Qualcomm's Zeroth processor, designed to emulate millions of the billions of neurons within the human brain.
A version of the Zeroth has already been built into a robotic platform that learns by being encouraged—quite literally, "good robot"—rather than being traditionally programmed, Qualcomm executives said.
For years, technologists have talked about personal assistants, pieces of code that pull in data and try to coalesce them into information that's relevant and useful. Qualcomm's Zeroth could form the hardware foundation upon which future personal assistants are built.
"Wouldn't it be swell to have a device that you could train?" said M. Anthony Lewis, the senior director and the project engineer responsible for the Zeroth, in an interview. "It leads to the possibility of a customized user experience for each individual cellphone user, to be more like the phone that they want rather than the phone that they get."
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