Tencent YouTu Teams Up With Intel For AI Products

Remi El-Ouazzane, the COO and vice president of Intel’s AI Products Group recently spoke about their AI collaboration with the Tencent YouTu Lab DeepGaze, YouBox, AI Box and AI Camera. In his words, “With artificial intelligence, enterprises can gain new insights about their customers to both elevate the users’ experience and drive business transformation. Tencent’s new AI camera solutions take advantage of powerful Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ technology to enable deep neural networks to run directly on the cameras, providing real-time and actionable data for various businesses, including retail and smart buildings.”

Fig. 1: Representational Image of YouBox (Official PR)

Intel is playing a crucial role in empowerment of DeepGaze, YouBox, and other AI products. For example, the Intel Movidius Myriad 2 VPU (Vision Processing Unit) empowers the DeepGaze AI camera that supplies retail chains with data related to customer movement patterns in the store, their numbers, age group and timings. It is a smart camera that would handle the object and pre-processing detection as the relevant data will be get transferred into Tencent’s cloud for deeper analysis.

Similarly, the YouBox will allow older versions of Retail camera systems to upgrade to their intelligent formats. In words of the General Manager of YouTu Lab, Simon Wu, “ Intel is the perfect partner for our flexible enterprise solutions. Based on Intel Movidius Myriad VPUs, the YouTu camera and box perform inference at the edge in tandem with Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud to provide cost-effective and flexible solutions for verticals including retail and construction.”

Customer analytics will play an important role in predicting sales performance on the basis of real-time and trends tracking of product turnover and shoppers’ activity. The system would also alarm the store employees for restocking shelves without wasting any time in manual inventory management. Finally, it will be the next step in personalization of shopping experience for the customer as they will be informed the moment their favorite product is restocked in the shelf.