Raspberry Pi Foundation have announced on their blog that Google is set to introduce a range of artificial intelligence and machine learning services to the Raspberry Pi platform. These new tools will be used to bolster the already capable device, which has sold over ten million around the world. Some of the reasons why the Raspberry Pi has been a very popular hobbyist computer is that the device is supremely flexible, highly portable, reasonably well equipped and inexpensive. There have been no shortage of developers willing to experiment with the tiny computer. In addition to the artificial intelligent features, Google are reportedly bringing other developer tools to the Raspberry Pi platform. There’s even a survey for existing Raspberry Pi owners to complete to help steer Raspberry Pi Foundation towards providing the services and features that customers want for their Raspberry Pi device. It will be interesting to see what new projects people will come up with for the Raspberry Pi once it is connected to Google’s deep machine learning and artificial intelligence systems, and it’s encouraging to see Raspberry Pi Foundation asking customers what they would like to see developed for the platform.
There was some excitement generated back in April 2016 when a new developer tree was discovered on the Android Open Source Project, which looked like a development team were modifying the Android platform so as to make it run on the Raspberry Pi hardware. We do not know if this is an official, unofficial or separate developer team from Google but their efforts have so far not yielded in a full blown Android for the Raspberry Pi platform. We have, however, seen Google working with Raspberry Pi technologies, such as an online coder allowing HTML, CSS and Javascript projects be loaded direct to the Pi. More recently at the end of 2016, Raspberry Pi Foundation has ported a version of its Pixel operating system to both the Mac and PC platforms. This move is not necessarily to allow people to run the Raspberry Pi platform on their desktops and laptops, but to allow developers to build applications direct from their computer and run them in a desktop application on a more powerful computer. Unfortunately, we do not know when Google’s artificial intelligent new services will be released for the Raspberry Pi, other than Raspberry Pi Foundation is “hopeful there will be developments to reveal later in 2017.” At this time, Google have yet to comment about the Raspberry Pi project.