SmartCow, an AI engineering company specialising in video analytics and AIoT devices, introduced its new audio-visual development kit, Apollo. Built around Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX, Apollo enables developers to create applications with conversational AI capabilities.
The global Natural Language Processing (NLP) market is predicted to grow from $20.98 billion in 2021 to $127.26 billion in 2028 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 29.4 per cent in the forecast period.
With six starter NLP examples and seamless, out-of-the-box speaker recognition, SmartCow’s Apollo meets the increasing demand for development kits that simultaneously process both audio and video data using advanced AI models.
“Traditional development kits are geared toward beginner-level developers working with general purpose use cases with AI vision widely used across applications. We recognize the breadth and depth of developers out there who want a dev kit that enables them to go deeper in their research and development, including the ability to implement conversational AI and NLP,” said Ravi Kiran, Founder and CEO of SmartCow. “Apollo is a specialised dev kit created to meet higher-level developers’ needs and give them a way to get straight to more conversational applications.”
SmartCow’s Apollo development kit features onboard visual and audio sensors, including four microphones, two speaker terminals, two 3.5mm phone jacks, an 8MP IMX179 camera module, and an OLED display. In addition, Apollo features a 128GB NVMe SSD for storage and comes pre-packaged with the Nvidia DeepStream and RIVA Embedded SDK toolkits.
The six NLP examples showcasing the kit’s unique capabilities include: text-independent speaker recognition systems; speech to text and sentiment analysis; language translations and speaker diarizations; and applications for abnormal sound and surveillance.
Apollo development kits support two programmable buttons: a default with one-key recovery to help the developers ease the procession of device recovery and a programmable button that provides flexibility for developers to add their own applications, offering them a more accessible means to developing. Moreover, Apollo is designed with a base frame that allows it to stand upright, making Apollo easy to work with.
“Edge computing technology has revolutionised the way people work, live and travel,” continued Kiran. “Apollo enables developers to continue to create and build the applications that transform everyday life such as digital transformation of conference rooms, airport self-service counters, facility management, and more. By including advanced NLP to our development kits, Apollo addresses these growing needs, enabling users to create conversational edge computing applications.”
