Lenovo’s new lineups of Yoga and IdeaPad devices will come with Creator Zone, an on-device AI “designed to significantly enhance the creative process,” the company announced during IFA 2024 in Berlin on Thursday.
The application is geared toward graphic designers, content creators, and marketers. It is powered by a fine-tuned version of Stable Diffusion 3.0 that is exclusive to Lenovo. Using natural language processing, Creator Zone can generate and modify images based on the user’s text prompts, sketches, and reference images.
Using either or both text and sketch prompts, the AI will return four images based pn the prompt’s description, allowing users to further iterate from those suggestions. Image-to-image generation is more for “creating variations of existing images to explore different styles and themes,” per the company’s announcement. You’ll also be able to edit aspects of the generated images, including background changes, image merging, and color adjustments.
“These new products are designed to be more personalized and empower their users by stimulating creativity, increasing productivity, and fitting in seamlessly into the increasingly dynamic, tech-centric lives that they lead,” Jun Ouyang, Lenovo’s senior vice president and general manager of Consumer Business Segment, Intelligent Devices Group, said in a press release.
Lenovo Creator Zone will ship on the newly announced Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, Yoga Pro 7, IdeaPad Slim 5, IdeaPad Slim 5x, and IdeaPad Slim 5x 2-in-1. It will also be available as an optional download in October for Lenovo Yoga devices with discrete GPUs, like the Yoga Pro 9i. Support for other Yoga devices will be “added later.”
Digital Trends was able to check out the application on the IFA show floor Thursday and came away rather impressed. We tried it on both a laptop with a discrete GPU, as well as on a Copilot+ PC with just a more powerful NPU. The application was pretty fast on both machines, with only a small amount of lag. Feeding it a straightforward and brief prompt returned images in a matter of seconds, though a more complex prompt with “enhance” took anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds. This is done all on-device, meaning not only is it fast, but it’s also free.
Lenovo is far from the only device manufacturer to incorporate on-device AI into their products. Google, Microsoft and Apple are all scrambling to add generative AI to their handsets and devices, whether that’s in the form of Google’s Magic Eraser feature, Microsoft’s line of Surface Copilot+ laptops, or Apple’s upcoming ChatGPT integration and Apple Intelligence system. AMD has its own on-device image generation app, and so does Intel.
As large language models become more efficient, both in terms of energy consumption and compute, and able to fit in smaller footprints, expect to see “AI enhanced” features come to even more modern gadgets.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
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