However I suspect it will take some time before NPUs have THAT much effect on our everyday computing (ie what Joe Average User gets out the box or via some high profile apps).
What we have now, realistically, appears to be primarily image recognition in a few limited scenarios, primarily FaceID, and photo labelling.
Where do we go from here? A few concepts have been suggested (many around image recognition) but I'm unaware of them actually shipping. For example connections to AR have been suggested (recognize the items and people in a live video stream), but that's not yet a product, just a cute demonstration. Likewise, ala _Silicon Valley_, "the Shazam of Food" might one day be useful in counting calories purely by having the camera recognize the food (AND it's quantity...) on your plate, but so far that's an idea, no more.
Many other things have been suggested -- translation, sentiment analysis, language understanding, ...; but as far as I know these either don't yet work THAT well, or aren't available to consumers, or don't actually need an NPU (especially an on-device NPU --- maybe they use a TPU back home in the data center).
For example, yes, Siri (and Bixby and the rest of them) engage in some sort of pattern recognition on the device to do various useful things (like suggest the next few apps you might want to run), and (at least in the case of Siri) these are generally useful and generally accurate. But I see no evidence that they especially require an NPU; the data volumes are small, and they worked as well as they do today on pre-NPU iOS devices.
I'm not poo-poo'ing the idea of NPUs. And even if all they did was FaceID, well, FaceID is pretty damn magical and worth having! I AM suggesting that I've heard little in the stream of hype that I find convincing as realistic uses for NPUs *TODAY* beyond what I have given.
It took us a remarkable amount of time to figure out generically useful ways to exploit GPUs beyond just video-games; I suspect the same might be true for NPUs, that it will be 5 years or more before we see them doing anything that's ACTUALLY interesting (again, beyond what I've already listed).
