A year ago, Microsoft hyped Copilot PCs as the next big thing. Twelve months later, it's hard not to see them as one of the tech industry's more significant flops. The question is whether they'll stay that way. Many Copilot PCs began shipping on June 18, 2024, about a month after Microsoft announced the program at the company's headquarters a month earlier. Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Microsoft's own Surface division committed to shipping Copilot PCs, whose centerpiece was a processor with an embedded Neural Processing Unit -- the engine of AI -- capable of 40 trillion operations per second, or TOPS.

SoundHound has partnered with Qualcomm to integrate its voice AI tech onto some of Qualcomm's Snapdragon platforms. The new arrangement will streamline adding SoundHound's automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, and text-to-speech functions for app and device developers using certain Snapdragon chipsets. Embedding SoundHound's technology on Snapdragon provides a shortcut for developers interested in adding conversational voice experiences and interactions into their products without having to make their devices bigger or software more complex. SoundHound's tech includes benefits like voice detection in noisy environments and user identification, too, removing more of the common barriers for incorporating voice tech. The collaboration means Android developers can create apps that respond to voice requests even if the device is already playing other audio content.

Analysis Artificial intelligence and machine learning engines are underpinning many emerging applications and services, from making sense of big data for enterprises, to supporting hyper-personalized consumer content, or virtual reality gaming. The current challenge is to move AI from the supercomputer to the mobile device, supporting technologies like computer vision locally on the handset, car, camera or VR headset. Qualcomm has been a leader here, but the past weeks have seen Intel and its Chinese partner Rockchip invest in chip-level computer vision and AI capabilities, while Apple has acquired machine learning startup Turi, presumably to enhance its AI-driven personal assistant Siri. Rockchip has licensed the XM4 imaging and vision DSP (digital signal processor) design from IP provider CEVA, to enhance these aspects of its system-on-chip (SoC) products. It says it will enable advanced vision features at the low power levels required for mobile devices, supporting digital video stabilization, object detection and tracking, and 3D depth sensing, among others.