'Artificial Intelligence' Asus ZenFone 5Z India Launch

AI a.k.a artificial intelligence is the hottest buzzword around and manufacturers have been throwing the term around all too liberally. With hardware becoming commoditised, OEMs all over the world are coming to realise the next revolution clearly lies in software. It's in this backdrop that Asus has launched the ZenFone 5Z, and as you would expect, the company is touting it worked closely with Qualcomm to implement AI features in its newest flagship smartphone.

The ZenFone 5Z and ZenFone 5 mark a return to the high-end segment for Asus after briefly dabbling in affordable selfie centric smartphones. The ZenFone 5Z, which has been launched in India at a starting price of Rs. 29,999, is built around the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset and runs ZenUI 5.0.

The Asus ZenFone 5Z has a a 6.2-inch full-HD+ (1080x2246 pixels) LCD display with a 19:9 aspect ratio and comes with up to 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of internal storage. On the imaging front, the smartphone has a dual camera setup at the back, with a 12-megapixel primary sensor, with an aperture of f/1.8, and an 8-megapixel secondary sensor, with an aperture of f/2.2. On the front, the Asus ZenFone 5Z comes with an 8-megapixel sensor with an aperture of f/2.0.

According to Asus, the ZenFone 5Z utilises the AI Engine inside the Snapdragon 845 to full effect. The company boldly claims it is time to move on from smartphones to intelligent phones. So does the ZenFone 5Z have what it takes to back such an ambitious claim?



Before we can go ahead with the article, we need to have a basic understanding of artificial intelligence and what classifies as AI. In the world of marketing at least, there is no hard and fast definition of artificial intelligence which makes it very easy for companies to reduce AI to nothing but a buzzword.

In the broadest of terms, AI is anything or any instance where a machine is able to reason and make decisions that are not explicitly programmed. There are two main facets to AI - machine learning and deep learning. To put it simply, machine learning gives a phone the ability to learn and improve from data, without being explicitly programmed to do so. Deep learning is more advanced and nuanced and uses neural networks with many layers and hierarchies, to learn and decide optimal parameters for the task in hand.

With the ZenFone 5Z, Asus has embraced the AI trend head-on. Almost every aspect of the smartphone, from the software to the camera is infused with artificial intelligence. The gallery and camera apps, particularly, are worth talking about. There's the usual AI scene detection in the camera, where-in the smartphone can ascertain what you are shooting and change settings accordingly. There are 16 modes on offer at the moment including common ones like dog, cat, plant, food text, and sky.

Where things get interesting is in the gallery app. A feature called AI Photo Learning lets you teach the phone how you like your photos to look. After one to three weeks, the ZenFone 5Z starts offering edited versions of photos in the moments tab of the gallery. If you like the changes, you can accept the edited photo. If not, you can reject it and choose the original version instead. Over time, this feedback helps dictate how the camera processes images.