If you’re anything like me, you love eating out at restaurants. Being able to share delicious food with family and friends is one of life’s greatest pleasures.
Until it’s time to pay, that is. It’s fine if one person gets the whole bill or if the bill is split between two, but if it’s more than that, things get messy.
Do you go Dutch or do you buy everything just to pay for what they had? And what about the tip?
That’s where Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile chipset, and more specifically its multimodal AI, comes into the picture. It includes a generative AI assistant that can respond to a variety of different inputs, including text, voice, images and videos.
That includes the ability to recognize wherever you point your phone, something Qualcomm showed off during a demo at the Snapdragon Summit.
Normally, receiving a receipt at the end of your meal would prompt a lively discussion and lots of use of the calculator app on your phone. Instead, you can simply point your phone at the receipt and ask to “add a 20% tip and split the bill in thirds.”
Within a few seconds, the generative AI had recognized all the information on the receipt and calculated how much everyone would have to pay. It was completely seamless, and something I wished I had had at my disposal more than once.
That’s one of the many ways Qualcomm’s multimodal generative AI can really improve your daily life. Other examples included working out the answer to a geometric math question or recognizing trends in graphs.
Even more impressive is the ability to ask follow-up questions in natural language and receive relevant results, although I wasn’t able to see that in action.
But the possibilities for multimodal generative AI are virtually limitless, making the prospect of it being applied to the next generation of Android phones very exciting.
It remains to be seen how many Android flagships integrate it directly into their software experience and don’t require users to pay. But if it continues to work as advertised, it feels like generative AI could have real mainstream appeal for the first time.
Even if it just helps me split the bill at a restaurant, I’ll be happy.
