Baidu provides tools to make AI app development easy for non-coders

Jul 8, 2018, 11:42 am EDT | Chris Burt

Baidu provides tools to make AI app development easy for non-coders

Baidu has updated its AI platform to make its tools, including facial recognition and natural language processing, more accessible to developers as part of a series of launches announced at its Create 2018 developer conference in Beijing, SiliconANGLE reports.

Developers and individuals without coding skills can use APIs from the new Baidu Brain 3.0 platform to drag-and-drop elements to build applications using 110 AI capabilities, according to DIGITIMES.

“The demand for AI and machine learning is increasing rapidly, but the lack of infrastructure and technology know-how is preventing smaller businesses from adopting AI,” said Baidu Artificial Intelligence Group Head and Senior Vice President Haifeng Wang. “By opening up our resources in algorithms, computing and big data, Baidu is gradually breaking this barrier down to allow everyone to access AI in the most convenient and equitable way.”

Baidu is also launching a pair of chips, which it says are the first cloud-to-edge AI chips developed in China, to support intensive workloads like AI voice recognition applications. The Kunlun 818-300 is designed for AI training, and the Kunlun 818-100 is designed for inferencing, and Baidu says they are 30 times more powerful than its original field-programmable gate arrays, which the new chip designs are based on. The speech capabilities of the chips are seen as particularly important given Baidu’s core business as a search engine, with speech growing as an input method for searches.

Researchers from the company published a comparison of speech cloning methods which could be used to personalize interactions between humans and machines, or to spoof speech recognition systems, earlier this year.