Bits & Bytes
Google announced a bunch of interesting ML/AI-related news at last week’s Next conference. Here are the highlights, along with a few other tidbits.
Google launches new AI-powered contact center solution.
- The global market for cloud-based contact center solutions is expected to exceed $30B by 2023. It’s no surprise that Google wants a piece of this, and to that end launched the Contact Center AI alpha. The new offering combines Google’s Dialogflow chat platform with other AI technologies—e.g. agent assist and a conversational topic modeler—to help customers reduce wait times, improve customer satisfaction, and gain greater insights. A full host of technology and services partners were announced as well.
Furthering its edge initiatives, Google releases new Cloud IoT Edge.
- Cloud IoT Edge includes Edge IoT Core, which facilitates the connection of edge devices to the Google Cloud and simplifies their management, and Edge ML, which supports running pre-trained TensorFlow Lite models on edge hardware. Cloud IoT Edge is designed to take advantage of the newly announced Edge TPU as well (see below).
Google unveils new AI chips for edge machine learning.
- Google is bringing its TPU accelerator chips from the cloud to the edge with the launch of Edge TPU, currently in early access. Aiming to compete with offerings like the Nvidia Jetson and Intel Movidius product families, Edge TPU brings high-performance ML inference to small, power-constrained devices.
Google adds Natural Language and Translation services to the Cloud AutoML family.
- I covered the launch of Google Cloud AutoML Vision in the newsletter earlier this year. Last week Google pulled back the covers on new AutoML services for natural language classification and translation. Skip the press releases though and check out Rachel Thomas’ great series of posts on these new tools.
For more from Google and Next, check out these roundups of all announcements and analytics/ML announcements.
Dollars & Sense
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Snap40, which uses ML/AI for remote patient monitoring, has secured US $8 million in seed financing
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Zorroa, which provides a platform for managing visual assets, has closed a $7M funding round
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Shanghai-based Wayz.ai, a smart location and mapping start-up (not to be confused with Waze) announced that it has raised a US$80 million series A
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Unisound, a Chinese AI solutions provider, specialized in voice recognition and language processing, has received RMB600 million ($89 million) in Series C-plus funding
