HONG KONG – Artificial intelligence technologies are penetrating consumer markets faster than ever before. Now, in a world first, Chinese tech giant Honor has brought an AI-powered smartphone to the market – and it's poised to accelerate adoption of this groundbreaking technology. Honor, an independent sub-division of Huawei, first announced the flagship Honor View10 back in December of 2017. Billed as a lightning-fast consumer smartphone, there's much more going on under the skin of the View10 than is immediately obvious. The View10's Kirin 970 processor is integrated with a dedicated neural network processing unit (NPU) to deliver AI features and performance that the company claims'far surpasses' any CPU or GPU-powered architecture.

When we point our smartphone camera, tap on the screen and take a picture, it's easy to forget, photography hasn't always been as simple as it is today – but that's the illusion of AI – what appears simple is in fact, incredibly complex. Phones like the Honor View10 are powered by the Kirin 970 processor, with AI at its heart. It sees through the dual lenses around the back, identifies what it's looking at using its Neural Processing Unit and captures your memories in stunningly high-resolution. But how did we arrive at the age of AI photography and what will smartphone photography look like in the future? As little as 20 years ago, digital cameras were anything but the norm – and the idea of a camera on your smartphone?

What is AI? Watch our explanation, brought to you by Honor. Although many of us interact with our smartphones hundreds of times a day, for most it can seem like a one-way process. We document our lives onto our devices, but for many, a supposedly "smart" device often feels like it is missing a certain spark of intelligence. Dubbed, "your first AI phone", the Honor View10 is the only device from the company to sport the Kirin 970 chipset with an embedded NPU, or Neural-Network Processing Unit. Much like the CPU and GPU hardware inside your current smartphone, tablet or laptop, the NPU is able to power a number of high-end machine learning algorithms that provide AI smarts far beyond anything else on the market today.