The AI PC Era š for Call Centers is here
āThe AI PC will be a sea change moment in technical innovationā
Pat Gelsinger (CEO of Intel), Dec 2023
AI PC has a CPU, a GPU and an NPU, each with specific AI acceleration capabilities. An NPU, or neural processing unit, is a specialized accelerator that handles AI tasks right on your PC instead of sending data to be processed in the cloud. The GPU and CPU can also process these workloads, but the NPU is especially good at low-power AI calculations.
The AI PC represents a fundamental shift in how our computers operate. It is not a solution for a problem that didnāt exist before. Instead, it promises to be a huge improvement for everyday PC usages.
Intel launched NPUs back in Dec 2023. All Intel chips will have NPUs now
Nvidia has started making AI-powered CPU for Windows
Appleās M-series chips had a built-in Neural Engine for a while
Qualcommās chips have built-in NPUs
AMD has AI-enabled chips with NPUs
The AI PC era is certainly here. All PCs from now on will have NPUs built-in.
What does this mean for Call Centers?
More Voice AI capabilities will be able to run locally
In a not-very-far future, we will see real-time locally-run
Speech-to-text
Text-to-speech
Noise Cancellation
Translation
Sentiment Analysis
Voice Conversion
Accent Localization
Large and Small Language Models
We will see new AI-powered products/features designed specifically for call center agent productivity, running on-device. And call centers that donāt have the capability to run such workloads on PCs, will be missing out.
While the VDI-based thin-device architecture has been quite successful, it might need to be reshaped since running on-device AI workloads will be cheaper than sending them to the cloud.
Bottom line: Call Center architects should plan their infrastructures for embracing this change. They should embrace the 3 trends - Cloud, VDI (virtual desktops) and AI PC and find the optimal architecture for this inevitable change.