Baidu ramps up presence in IoT and AI with new projects - Internet of Business

Chinese firm switches focus on smart AI devices and a new AI platform for self-driving cars and taxis. China-based internet services firm Baidu is aiming to ramp up its presence in the Internet of Things (IoT), with a number of new projects. The firm plans to work with speaker manufacturer Harman International Industrial to create a smart AI device similar to Amazon's Echo, which can understand spoken commands, enabling users to instruct it to order food, call a cab or control smart home products, reports Bloomberg. The Chinese company is also partnering with chipmaker Nvidia, to develop a computing platform for self-driving cars and taxis which would incorporate cloud-based HD maps, according to Fortune. Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told delegates at the Baidu World Conference, that the firms were going to "bring together the technical capabilities and the expertise in AI and the scale of two world-class AI companies to build the self-driving car architecture from end-to-end, from top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car".