Prisma has made some significant changes in the last 24 hours starting with the addition of filtered video on iOS. This meant that the Android users were now 2 steps behind on features where the other one included the ability to add filters without needing an internet connection.
Well they have remedied that by releasing an update to Prisma for Android where all the processing to turn your photos into pieces of art will be done offline with your phone doing all of the work.
Apparently for now, only 60% of the available styles (they are like 38 in total) can be used offline. The trick is that they have integrated the neural AI code in the app so that your phone’s CPU will do all of the processing instead of the previous system where Prisma’s servers did all of the work.
However, this means that how fast your phone will process your image will depend on how powerful its CPU is. For example, it has been quoted that it will only take 2 seconds if your phone is a Galaxy S7 or 5 seconds (It has either the powerful Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890). However, if your phone is the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 which has the less powerful Snapdragon 650, it will take 5 seconds to process a filter. My phone has the old flagship Snapdragon 801 chip and was able to process a filter in 5 seconds which is good enough. In comparison, the iPhone 6 processes in 3 seconds while the 6S does it in 2.5 seconds.
This move will finally alleviate the overcapacity problem Prisma had when the app became suddenly popular. In addition, offline mode will be available to Android devices that have Lollipop or newer but apparently the company is working to make sure that users with Kitkat (Android 4.4) would get the feature too.
We only have to wait now for the video filter feature which iOS received today which has been promised to Android users by the end of the month.
