Artificial intelligence or helps Intel increase sales

May 12, according to foreign media reports, Intel spent about 30 million US dollars (about 185 million yuan) to acquire the personal assistant business of Ginger Software (hereinafter referred to as "Ginger"). Intel’s move has been widely praised in the industry because it may drive sales of its processor chips.

Ginger's natural language processing tools and open personal assistant platform complement Intel's earlier acquisition of artificial intelligence and advanced computing. Last year Intel acquired Indysis. Like Ginger, Indysis is a startup company engaged in the development of natural language processing technology. Its main business is dialogue-based cognitive science, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and computational linguistics.

Ginger's contribution Intel has been actively developing voice recognition and personal assistant technology. Intel and Nuance jointly developed an excellent product called Dragon Assistant. Dragon Assistant's dialogue and self-learning capabilities are based on Intel's powerful processing capabilities. Personal assistant technology can drive the growth of Intel's core processor business - selling more powerful processors.

Intel's demo video shows the power of Dragon Assistant. As the Dragon Assistant faces traditional computers, Intel still needs applications that are suitable for running on smartphones and other smart devices. However, instead of relying on Microsoft and its Cortana virtual assistants, Intel acquired Ginger's natural language processing and personal assistant platform assets.

Cortana is considered to be the best Windows Phone 8.1 feature. However, Intel still does not provide chips for Windows Phone handsets. The Ginger assets have enabled Intel to make significant progress in voice recognition and artificial intelligence research and development.

Intel may use Ginger's personal assistant platform to attract smart hardware vendors to adopt their processors. Manufacturers of mobile phones and tablet computers all hope to customize virtual assistant applications and increase their brand awareness.

Intel’s future smartwatches, smart glasses, Jarvis headphones, and other IoT products may or may not have small displays and will rely on speech recognition and artificial intelligence to implement their intelligence. The Basis smartwatch equipped with a small display allows users to dictate emails or use voice-based human-computer interactions to benefit from Ginger's speech recognition technology.

Gaining talent acquisition through acquisitions Some of Ginger’s assets also enable Intel to acquire some of the best natural language processing experts. Sixteen Ginger engineers will join Intel, including Ginger founder and CEO Yael Karov. Karlov is a natural language processing expert and chief scientist of Ginger's personal assistant department.

Karlov's resume is very "powerful." She has 30 patents and should have convinced Intel investors that she will make a significant contribution to Intel's natural language processing and artificial intelligence efforts. There is a section of Karlov on YouTube explaining why the virtual personal assistant is extremely important to the growing mobile and Internet of Things industries.

Intel will also acquire Micha Y.Breakstone, another big name in the field of natural language processing. Brixton is the vice president of R&D and personal assistant business at Ginger. He founded Excelingo, a cross-platform mobile language learning company.

Conclusion Natural language processing and artificial intelligence require very high computing power and should be able to drive the needs of Intel processors. As voice recognition and artificial intelligence become more advanced in virtual personal assistants, the demand for smaller, more powerful processors will increase.