Google has announced its partnership with Raspberry Pi to develop a range of smart tools that will made available in 2017.
The company plans to bring its artificial intelligence, machine learning and all its other developer tools to the small computer.
In a blog post, Raspberry Pi said: “The tech titan has exciting plans for the maker community… Google’s range of AI and machine learning technology could enable makers to build even more powerful projects.”
With the help of Raspberry Pi makers, suggestions of ideas will be given to Google for development direction through the creation of a survey.
The survey is designed to give makers the opportunity to pitch ideas as to what would be most useful to them, such as face and emotion recognition, speech-to-text translation, natural language processing and others.
Google said: “We at Google are interested in creating smart tools for makers, and want to hear from you about what would be most helpful.”
Google has been active in developing technologies in the fields of machine learning and AI. Following its acquisition of DeepMind AI it has developed a variety of different features such as it being able to master lip-reading in November 2016.
Along with various other technologies that Google has created for navigation, chatbots and analytics, Google’s AI and machine learning tools. The Google DeepMind Lab frequently appeared in the news in 2016 for its different advances made in the field of AI.
Last year saw the company develop different capabilities which included AI being made capable of dreaming and other skills.
Both Google and Raspberry Pi are yet to reveal any specific use cases or applications that have been developed ahead of the partnership. Although they have revealed that they will be particularly focusing on AI and machine learning, and as both companies have IoT products it is likely that this will be a key field of interest.
Although Raspberry Pi is seen as one of the innovators in the affordable hardware market it is far from alone. Asus for example, has just launched its new Tinker Board, which the company claims has a faster processor and more memory than the Raspberry Pi 3.
The company has not disclosed specific information on the product but the product is available for sale online for £45.83, which appears more expensive than the Raspberry Pi 3 costing £31.49.
Raspberry Pi has started 2017 with a flurry of activity with the recent launch of its new Compute Module 3, following its CM1 module launch in 2014 which was said to have received a lot of attention from different markets such as IoT and home automation.
Module 3 is said to offer a processor performing at 1.2GHz with 1GB RAM, which matches the Pi 3.