How The A.I. Chip in Microsoft's HoloLens Could Make Wearable Tech Work

The next generation of Microsoft's augmented reality headset, HoloLens 2, will feature a custom-made artificial intelligence chip, the company announced Monday. The new chip will be capable of analyzing speech and visual data directly without having to send the information to a cloud server for analysis. That change is meant to speed up performance for the Hololens 2 and make it work better as a mobile device. The new A.I. "coprocessor," a silicon chip designed but not manufactured by Microsoft, is meant to move the HoloLens further in terms of accurate recognition of different visuals and sounds being collected by the device. Typically, the HoloLens and other devices (like Siri on the iPhone) have to use cloud-based servers equipped with deep learning networks to make sense of the data the user provides.