As we talk about AI, we mostly focus on what you can create with this new technology in terms of pictures, videos or text. What has been missing are light AI applications that make our PC experience better. The kinds of things I’m expecting are apps that make you look better by taking years off your face or dynamically altering what you are wearing virtually so that if you aren’t presentable, you still appear as if you are (a game changer for those of us who work from home and have young children or over-eager pets).
One of the first efforts of this type was announced this week by Lenovo, Elliptic Labs and Intel as the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen13 Aura Edition. The Aura Edition is a special implementation of Intel’s most advanced mobile AI processor for localized AI use. And the result is a far lower cost and better implementation of a capability that used to be available only in high-end laptops.
Virtual Smart Sensors
What if you could emulate expensive hardware with AI software? This is the question Elliptic Labs answered with this ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura implementation. Without specialized hardware, Elliptic Labs’ Virtual Smart Sensors provide two unique capabilities to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura. The first is called Smart Share. Let’s say you want to move a picture from your smartphone to your PC. With Smart Share you just tap the smartphone with the picture on it against your PC and the picture moves between the two devices. No more emailing yourself the pictures or having to upload them onto a service and then accessing them from the service. The picture can be moved between the devices with just a tap.
The second feature is the AI Virtual Human Presence Sensor. This can tell if you are in front of your PC or not. With specialized hardware, we have had a limited version of this for some time. However, this new feature doesn’t require specialized hardware. When the user steps away from their desk, the system automatically sleeps, and when they return, the PC automatically wakes up.
While the picture transfer thing is pretty cool and would be useful to those who want to edit a recently taken picture on their laptop, the AI Virtual Human Presence Sensor is more interesting. This is because it not only would conserve power but prevent one of the common ways a user is compromised when someone walks up to your unattended PC and messes with it.
This can be particularly annoying if you have a co-worker, sibling or child who either likes to play pranks or someone that wants to do serious damage and that damage that could be traced back to your PC and you. Defending against the resulting charges can be very difficult unless there is some way to prove you weren’t at your desk when the damage was done.
And since this feature is software only, it can be upgraded over time as the technology advances without having to prematurely replace your PC. And given the Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura is one of the very best PCs in the market, you might want to keep it longer than most.
Wrapping Up:
This Elliptic Labs, Intel and Lenovo collaboration to create the X1 Carbon with AI smart features is just the beginning of some of the changes we’ll see as AI PCs become more common. Since the announcement last June and the pull-back of Microsoft Recall, there hasn’t been that much AI activity to justify the purchase of a new AI PC.
But as more and more of these AI apps become available, the usefulness of these AI PCs will increase, making them far more valuable as tools than they were initially. I expect we’ll see more and more of these compelling AI features over time. By 2027, getting a PC that isn’t AI-ready will be like buying a PC without a GPU today, pointless.
