Tencent releases open platform to help drive AI projects at other companies – SCMP
What happened: Tencent presented its AI Open Platform at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in a bid to offer its technology to individual developers and enterprises. The platform includes Tencent’s AI Lab’s machine-learning, WeChat’s speech recognition and natural language processing and facial recognition capabilities provided by its Computer Vision Research Centre. The platform will provide more than 100 system interfaces for various industries, according to the platform’s general manager Hou Xiaonan.
Why it’s important: Although Tencent has been developing AI for a long time (their speech recognition technology has been integrated in WeChat for 3 years), this represents another push for the company to provide AI service and to compete to with Baidu and Alibaba. Tencent has also been experimenting with AI news article writers and integrating facial recognition in gaming.