Baidu and Xiaomi have announced a strategic partnership to take on two emerging technologies, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence.
According to a TechCrunch news report, the partnership is between the third most valuable publicly traded Chinese technology company in Baidu, which is the country’s equivalent of Google, and one of the world’s most valuable private firms, Xiaomi, which has modeled itself after Apple.
While this is the first time the companies are announcing a collaboration, Baidu’s conversational operating system – DuerOS – is already present in some Xiaomi hardware.
Specific details of the partnership weren’t released, but the firms said they will immediately explore opportunities in voice recognition, deep learning and computer vision, as well as more work with DuerOS. Baidu’s tech also extends into robotics, AR, VR and self-driving cars.
The potential benefits of technology sharing would make each company far more competitive than they are on their own. In fact, Baidu has chosen a partnership-based approach with hardware makers to launch DuerOS and other tech, and claims to work with 130 companies that cover smartphones, smart TVs, smartwatches and home appliances.
The company also recently released details of its first smart speaker, the Raven series, which was the result of its acquisition of hardware startup Raven earlier this year.
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