MANILA, Philippines – Google announced the release of a new compression tool that can supposedly reduce the amount of bandwidth used for downloading high-resolution images.

Called RAISR – Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution – the compression tool was originally introduced via a blog post in November 2016. Google claims the tool can cut up to 75% off the bandwidth cost of a downloaded image.

RAISR does this through machine learning. It will analyze the high- and low-resolution version of an image and then simulate the difference between the two to make the downloaded image look better.

Google says it has rolled out the RAISR primarily on Google+ as well as on the streams of a subset of Android devices. It claimed the compression tool reduced users’ total bandwidth by about a third, and that RAISR has been applied “to more than 1 billion images per week.”

Here’s to hoping it goes beyond Google+ and onto more Android devices over time. – Rappler.com