Like just about every big tech company these days, Chinese web giant Baidu is getting in on the smart speaker game. But the company is doing things noticeably different from Amazon or Google, despite selling its new Raven H speaker device. Instead the key product is the assistant software itself, the DuerOS AI platform, and Baidu's goal is to have it used in hardware from other manufacturers.
You might not have a BlackBerry in your pocket any more, but it may well be powering your self-driving car, at least if Baidu has any say in the matter. The Chinese behemoth has inked a deal with BlackBerry to make QNX the heart of its autonomous driving open platform, Apollo.
Microsoft and Baidu are hooking up on autonomous car tech, with the Seattle software giant playing cloud host to the Chinese behemoth's self-driving ambitions. The collaboration will see Microsoft Azure made the home for the Apollo alliance, Baidu's attempt to make autonomous driving an open platform. Importantly, it gives Apollo some degree of legitimacy outside of Baidu's home turf.
Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is no stranger to testing out unusual tech in its retail stores. There was that unusual chicken box, for example, that included a built-in battery for charging your phone, not to mention the edible nail polish. Now the company is back with yet another test, this one in collaboration with China' Baidu to launch facial recognition ordering technology at one of its stores in China.
Baidu, the Chinese search engine and internet giant, and Germany's BMW have announced that they're ending the autonomous car technology the pair first announced last summer. A formal product was never announced from the two companies, as the project never went beyond a joint research initiative. Thus far, the project saw Baidu make use of BMW's 3 Series sedans in its public road tests in China, and the plan was to do the same in the US in the near future.
When you speak of NVIDIA, you will mostly like first think of high-end graphics cards mostly used to power gaming rigs and hard-core multimedia computers. Of late, however, the company has been putting its processing power at the service not of gamers only but also of car makers. Earlier this year, it unveiled its new DRIVE PX 2 single-board computers that would drive, pun perhaps intended, hi-tech AI systems inside autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles. Now it is announcing the DRIVE PX 2 for AutoCruise, which is basically a DRIVE PX 2 that has been pared down to a single NVIDIA Parker chip.
Nvidia has announced a new partnership with Baidu, China's largest search engine, to work together on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for self-driving cars. The announcement was made at the Baidu World Conference last week, with Baidu planning to use the jointly-developed technology in its own fleet of autonomous taxis. But the companies also plan to make the platform available to other car manufacturers to who want to add self-driving tech to their vehicles.
Ford and Baidu have pumped $150m into Velodyne LiDAR, the sensor company specializing in the super-precise laser mapping systems many believe are vital to autonomous cars' success. Velodyne is responsible for the "turrets" most self-driving vehicles sprout from their roofs, each containing a laser array that can build up a 3D view of the world around them in real-time.
Chinese authorities have launched new regulations for the nation's search engines and the results they display to internet users. But as a country with some of the tightest controls over the internet, its use, and what information people have access to, China's new rules are actually beneficial for its citizens. Under the new rules, search engines are required to identify paid ads within search results, as well as verify advertisers.
Self-driving cars are the future, and humans have to learn to deal with that. There’s the need to accept that we won’t always be behind the wheel, of course, but it’s more than that — autonomous cars will one day drive as well as humans, but they will also drive differently, and that means both humans and the cities we construct must shift accordingly. Such is the argument recently put forth by Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese company Baidu.
Chinese search giant Baidu is set to bring its driverless car testing to the US in a move that sees the firm advocating coordination with the US government to get self-driving cars on the road. Baidu wants to have a commercially viable automated car available in China by 2018, which is well ahead of the goals set by some firms. Baidu has a tech center in Silicon Valley that will be used for the autonomous car effort.
Most of the autonomous cars you read about these days come from Europe and the US, and at least one from Japan. China, of course, isn't going to take that sitting down. A year ago, Baidu and BMW forged a partnership to bring China's first self-driving to China's highways by 2015. 2015 is all but over but at least Baidu has made some significant progress as far as tests go. The Chinese Internet giant has proudly announced how its modified BMW 3 was put to the test, driving through mixed roads and under very trying conditions. And it was able to arrive at its destination without incident, showing promise for what could be China's first fully-capable autonomous car.