A report released by market consulting firm CBInsights shows that since 2011, mergers and acquisitions in the AI (artificial intelligence) field have increased sevenfold. Among them, most startups are acquired within 4 years of financing. In 2016, AI startups attracted widespread attention and attracted $1.05 billion in funding in the third quarter. Technology giants are increasing their investment in AI research and development to benefit from the trend of transitioning to the digital market.
Google
Since 2011, one of the most active investors in the AI field has been Google's parent company alphabet. In the past 5 years, this company has acquired 11 companies closely related to AI.
Two years ago, Google spent $500 million to acquire artificial intelligence company Deep Thinking Technology. Deep Thinking recently launched its WaveNet service, which can generate raw audio patterns and mimic anyone's voice. Compared to existing text-to-speech systems, WaveNet sounds more natural. This means that in the near future, the position of manual telephone customer service may gradually disappear. Google stated that this technology will be fully open to companies using Google's cloud computing services.
Microsoft
In 2016, Microsoft established a venture capital fund focused on investing in AI companies. With the help of new chat robots, Microsoft not only plans to expand its intelligent tools, but also competes with Google in the global market.
In 2016, Microsoft also made significant breakthroughs in intelligent translation technology. Microsoft's online real-time translation service was launched for testing, allowing users to achieve live translation for multiple people, multiple languages, cross device, and face-to-face conversations using their personal connected smart devices. Currently, it supports voice input in 9 languages, including Mandarin Chinese, and text translation in nearly 60 languages.
Amazon
In 2016, Amazon's intelligent voice assistant Alexa caused a sensation after its launch, as it could recognize users' voice queries and respond. At the same time, Amazon announced the launch of a new AI platform, with the goal of creating more complex and customizable intelligent systems by providing deep learning components to application developers, AI engines, and data scientists.
Last year, Amazon also announced the upcoming launch of an AI grocery store called Amazon Go. In the future, in Amazon Go stores, with the help of sensors and artificial intelligence technology, customers can simply place their products in their shopping carts and the system can automatically checkout, saving them waiting time at the checkout counter.