Michael Simon, Macworld:

The company, Xnor.ai, might not be one you’ve ever heard of, but they’re hardly unknown. Since last summer, the Seattle-based startup’s tech has been the brains behind the popular Wyze cam’s marquee feature: people detection. Simply put, it allowed the $20 camera to distinguish between faces, pets, and dust, and vastly improved its abilities, putting it a somewhat level playing field with the far-more-expensive Ring and Nest cams of the world.

Michael makes the case that Xnor.ai’s “Edge AI” approach can greatly enhance what Siri might be able to do on-chip, without iCloud.

For example:

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.

And:

That same engine could be applied to speech patterns. Siri dictation isn’t bad at all, but saying “period” and “comma” gets tedious. Edge AI could recognize our vocal patterns, so when we pause a certain way it adds a period, or if we change out inflection it adds a question mark.

Really interesting read.