As early as four years ago, Apple and IBM reached a cooperation. Both sides created applications for Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices. The cooperation in the development of artificial intelligence services can be seen as an extension of that cooperation four years ago. At present, the two companies have jointly developed a variety of applications, such as helping medical workers better track the application of medical records, as well as help employees use information sharing applications.
The cooperation between the two companies can be described as a combination of heaven, Apple has a wealth of experience in the field of consumer technology, and IBM is good at enterprise technology. IBM hopes to work with Apple's design team to develop applications for corporate customers, so that these corporate customers Use these applications on mobile devices. For Apple, the significance of this cooperation is to sell devices such as iPhones and iPads to corporate customers.
In recent days, Apple has been paying more and more attention to selling equipment to businesses. Prior to this, they had been focusing on the consumer market. The corporate market accounted for only a small part of their work, and the revenue generated was not much. But with In the past two years, the overall smart phone consumer market has become saturated, and equipment sales have begun to decline. Apple has seen the value of corporate customers (for a long time the corporate market has been dominated by companies such as Microsoft and Dell), and Apple began to regard the corporate market as An important growth point.
Apple and network equipment giant Cisco also have similar cooperation. In the enterprise market, Cisco sells work collaboration software such as web services and video conferencing. These softwares are specifically optimized for Apple's devices.
IBM and Apple declined to disclose the specific number of revenues they created for their respective cooperation, simply stated that the customer orders created billions of dollars for them. IBM is responsible for the cooperation and alliance general manager Muhammad Nagshni ( Mahmoud Naghshineh stated that after Apple reached a cooperation, IBM has already sold more than 800 enterprise applications. IBM also revealed that they have teamed up with Apple to create 100 applications. These applications cover tourism, retail and transportation industries.
In order to deepen the cooperation between the two, Apple and IBM are not only developing applications for enterprise customers. They are about to build artificial intelligence services to make it easier for internal developers to develop their own applications.
The name of the service is Watson Services for Core ML, which includes the developer tools Core ML released by Apple last year and IBM's Watson data analysis service. Core ML can help developers to create machine learning applications that can be intelligent The mobile phone locally processes data computations more efficiently without the need to move the data traditionally to an external data center. This tool is similar to some other smart phone machine learning tools, such as Google's TensorFlow Lite.
Brian Croll, CEO of Apple OS Product Marketing, said in a statement: 'In cooperation with IBM, our goal is to help companies reshape their way of working. We believe in Core ML and Watson Services. The combination will give birth to the next generation of smart enterprise applications.
IBM's Nagshny noted that Watson Services for Core ML can make it easier for companies to create smarter smartphone apps than they do today.
For example, companies can transfer pictures of electronic devices to Watson and train them to identify features of mechanical components. This technology will then be added to the iPhone or iPad apps used by technicians, and technicians can use these apps to electronic devices. Check it out and find an exception the first time.
And in this process, the device does not need to send data to IBM's cloud computing data center for processing, but it allows the device to process the data locally. The advantage of this is that the processing speed is increased and the user can be provided with near real-time data. process result.
At present, Apple's Core ML Toolkit can connect multiple cloud-based machine learning services, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft services. After IBM has reached a cooperation, Core ML will also support IBM's machine learning services.
Nagshny revealed that Coca-Cola is currently testing the Watson Services for Core ML service to determine whether it can provide assistance to Coca-Cola technicians and make it easier for them to check the vending machines, but he did not disclose any details. Information. IBM also did not disclose how much Coca-Cola paid them when using this technology. It is very likely that Coca-Cola did not pay any fees to IBM. After all, they can provide feedback for IBM while IBM continues to test, so that IBM can continue to Technology is improved so that it can be promoted on a larger scale in the future.
The service will be freely available to developers for a period of time in the future. However, developers will need to pay for it after a while, and the deadline for free use has not yet been determined. David Kenny, general manager of IBM Watson Services, explains The new service is an integral part of the Watson artificial intelligence service. Watson artificial intelligence is a service launched by enterprise developers who are building machine learning applications.