Google’s AIY projects are still very much in their infancy with only a single, very hard to get kit released so far. They’ve acknowledged that today and announced it will soon be easier to get, and there are more projects coming soon.
AIY Projects are Do-It-Yourself kits that makers can build which use Google’s Artificial Intelligence tools to power things such as their initial project, Voice Kit.
Voice Kit was essentially a mini-Google Home powered by a Raspberry Pi 3, but Google is set to expand that to more projects adding in ‘vision and motion detection’ which will ‘go hand-in-hand’ on the Voice Kit project. Google says that their AIY Project kits will soon offer makers the “eyes,” “ears,” “voice” and sense of “balance” to allow simple yet powerful device interfaces.
This all sounds cool, but useless for anyone who missed out on Voice Kit. That’s why Google has partnered with MicroCenter in the US, and soon other partners in the world to make Voice Kit AIY Projects available to order. The kit costs $28.99USD and arrives in US stores on October 28th. Google says they will be ‘expanding globally by the end of this year’ – so we’ll have to wait for more info on where.
Google has very much embraced the maker community with AIY projects, but the response so far in getting the kits to interested parties has been lacking. We’ll hopefully see a partnership for distribution here in Australia later this year.
Excellent thanks for that update.