Pi Foundation, the makers of Raspberry Pi, never imagined their line of low-cost CPUs will be this successful. Founded four and a half years ago, Pi Foundation managed to sell more than 10 million units despite initial expectations projected just a few thousands of boards sold in total.
Raspberry Pi became the most popular computer ever assembled in the UK, and Google recently showed interest towards the Raspberry Pi devices. The company is planning to expand the tools available for developers and is currently running a survey for Pi makers, asking them what tools they would want Google to develop for Raspberry Pi.
Potential tools include software for face and emotion recognition, speech-to-text translation, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics and more. You access the survey by visiting Raspberry Pi webpage. Google intends to give smart tools to Pi developers, and enable them access to a powerful range of Google’s AI and machine learning technology. The smart tools should empower makers to build even more powerful projects.
The survey reads, “Hi, makers! Thank you for taking the time to take our survey. We at Google are interested in creating smart tools for makers and want to hear from you about what would be most helpful. As a thank you, we will share our findings with the community so that you can learn more about makers around the world.”
Google already cooperated with the Pi Foundation. Back in 2013 the company gifted $1 million worth of Raspberry Pi boards to thousands of schoolkids in the UK, and also developed an open source tool enabling developers to turn the Raspberry Pi into a web server. Google spokesperson stated that “We’re excited to keep sharing more open source machine learning tools with the community — stay tuned for more this year.”