Yes, the idea before the whole shove LLMs into everything era was that small, dedicated models for different tasks would be integrated into both the OS and applications.

If you're using a recent phone with a camera, it's likely using ML models that may or may not be using AI accelerators/NPUs on the device itself. The small models are there, though.

Same thing with translation, subtitles, etc. All small local models doing specialized tasks well.