Plans are underway for Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) to introduce machine learning, artificial intelligence and other developer tools to the Raspberry Pi. The news was first broken on Raspberry Pi’s website.
“Google is going to arrive in style in 2017. The tech titan has exciting plans for the Raspberry Pi community, with a range of AI and machine learning services ready to roll,” read the blog post.
Open to suggestions
To better understand what tools to offer, fans of Raspberry Pi will be required to provide their input in a survey. Natural language processing, speech-to-text translation, face recognition and sentiment analysis are all mentioned in the survey. Google is also interested in finding out what technologies the community is most enthusiastic about – whether it is wearable devices, robotics, or home automation.
Despite the developers initially only expecting to sell 1,000 units of the small computer, the Raspberry Pi boards have been a huge success managing to sell more than 10 million units. While the main motivation was to encourage more students to enroll in computer science, the tiny computer has had a bigger impact.
In 2016 following the opening of a new Raspberry Pi 3 tree on the Android Open Source Project there were rumors Google was planning to port Android to the tiny computer.
Rivals want a piece of the pie too
If the capabilities of the computer that is the size of a credit card are boosted, it will assist Raspberry Pi rivals. The encroaching competition includes the more expensive Tinker Board from Asus. Besides possession dimensions that are similar to those of the Raspberry Pi, it also has a quad-core processor that can play 24-bit audio and 4K video, Gigabit Ethernet and 2GB of RAM. Another competitor that is encroaching on the Raspberry Pi’s turf is the Micro:bit from the BBC which has now been transformed into a new not-for-profit firm that will help supply the gadget to students all over the globe.
The Raspberry Pi 3-based Compute Model 3 was recently launched by the Raspberry PI Foundation and has increased the CPU performance by approximately 1000%.
In Tuesday’s trading session Alphabet Inc rose by 0.60% to close the day at $849.53 a share.