Qualcomm and Microsoft are no strangers: In recent months, the two companies have teamed up together on bringing Cortana to smart device platforms and to launch the first Windows 10 on ARM PCs. Today at Build 2018, the Microsoft announced that the two are joining forces once again – this time as part of an effort centered on AI and developers.
Together, Microsoft and Qualcomm are creating a vision AI developer kit. Running Azure IoT Edge, the kit includes the hardware and software needed for developers to create camera-based IoT solutions. According to Microsoft, the camera can take advantage of Azure machine learning and cognitive services such as Custom Vision, which is now available to run at the edge, allowing devices to locally interpret what they see.
"This partnership allows developers to start building AI offerings with prebuilt solutions — including customizable models — or create new AI models and deploy directly to the cloud or to the new hardware accelerated devices," Microsoft said in a blog post today. "They can do so using the same powerful IoT Edge platform they have been using to manage other IoT devices and edge deployments — use a single pane of glass to manage all their AI assets across the cloud and the edge."
This is the second major partnership announced at Build, following up on a commercial meeting of the minds between Microsoft and drone maker DJI. Both partnerships focus on a key theme for Build 2018, however: AI and the intelligent edge.
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