To expedite the development of artificial intelligence systems in robotics, ABB Robotics announced Monday that it is launching a global competition. Submissions for systems and ideas in three categories are welcome for the 2024 Robotics AI Startup Challenge: autonomous decision-making, skill acquisition, and natural language programming.

According to the Zurich-based corporation, the goal of its most recent challenge is to encourage creativity and cooperation between it and forward-thinking startups across the globe.

“Innovation has been at the heart of ABB since the foundation of our robotics business 50 years ago, and we recognize the immense potential of startups and scaleups in driving technological advancement,” stated Marc Segura, president of ABB Robotics. “The ABB Robotics AI Startup Challenge is an opportunity for us to partner with the most creative and forward-thinking minds in the field, as we work together to shape the future of robotics and automation.”

Following a prior ABB challenge, Sevensense was acquired in January. The Swiss business created 3D vision navigation technology for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) with the help of AI. Based on the acquisition of ASTI Mobile Robotics in 2021, ABB stated that it intends to completely incorporate Sevensense’s technology into its AMR portfolio.

ABB stated that it is using artificial intelligence (AI) to build the next generation of robots, which would be more efficient, intuitive, adaptive, and user-friendly. This will enable the business to change industries in order to increase end users’ resilience and make work more fulfilling for workers.

ABB Invites Applications for its Robotics AI Startup Challenge

In addition to working directly with ABB’s experts, participants in the 2024 Robotics AI Startup Challenge will have access to cutting-edge robotics technologies and the company’s extensive global network of partners and customers. The winner team will receive a $30,000 cash award and the opportunity to work with ABB to explore collaborative go-to-market plans and investment prospects in a long-term collaboration.

Application for the challenge is now available. Startups with robots and AI experience are invited to submit proposals by June 12, 2024. The challenge website has further details about the contest.

According to ABB, the competition is a component of their larger Innovation Ecosystem, which is “motivated by cooperation and the revolutionary possibilities of new technologies.” According to the company, it has developed programs to find, assist, and grow promising new businesses in various sectors.

The objective of ABB is to “create a more sustainable and productive future,” and it believes that such partnerships with forward-thinking companies will aid in the introduction of new systems to the market. Over 11,000 workers from over 53 countries work for ABB Robotics & Discrete Automation. The company’s modular industrial robot arms earned it the 2024 RBR Robotics Innovation Award.

Dialogue voice With its Smart Receptionist, artificial intelligence disruptor Onvego is poised to completely transform the commercial telephony market. Every business phone conversation is now worth more thanks to this AI breakthrough.

With small and medium-sized enterprises in mind, Smart Receptionist was created as an inexpensive AI-based phone handling and appointment management solution. After learning from partners about the challenges their clients have in receiving incoming calls, Onvego’s experts created a smooth platform for taking business calls.

The solution goes above and beyond conventional automated attendants. It was created in partnership with Phone.com, Onvego’s design partner. The AI-driven Smart Receptionist can arrange and reschedule appointments, filter spam, and redirect calls. It also addresses a lot of commonly asked questions, which eliminates the need for a dedicated individual to reply to inquiries about the services provided by an SMB.

Gonen Ziv, Chief Revenue Officer at Onvego, stated, “The Smart Receptionist will always answer when opportunity calls.” It’s quick and simple to set up. With the Smart Receptionist, businesses can go live in roughly five minutes.

Industrial Difficulties

Due to a lack of funding, personnel costs, time constraints, and training, businesses have struggled for far too long to effectively manage their communication channels on several fronts.

Research constantly indicates that daily, up to 50% of calls made by consumers to businesses go unanswered. With studies from Invoka and other sources showing that leads from inbound phone calls have a 10-15 times higher conversion rate than leads from other sources, it is evident that small business owners may benefit from phone traffic.

The Best Friend for Your Business

Modern, proprietary intellectual property (IP) is utilized by Onvego’s Smart Receptionist to provide natural language understanding (NLU) and automated speech recognition (ASR). It integrates text-to-speech (TTS), natural language processing (NLP), and large language model (LLM) technologies without making any of their complexity known to users or callers.

With any cloud telephony or enterprise VoIP solution, its conversational speech AI seamlessly connects. It eliminates spam around-the-clock, takes calls, makes appointments, and answers phones. Callers can communicate naturally and be understood with 99%+ accuracy in speech understanding. Today’s user-friendly technology transforms company telephony from a call-missing liability to a call-making asset.

As part of the growth of Smart Receptionist, Onvego has also unveiled its brand-new, fully customisable FAQ module, driven by AI. Any company that gets incoming phone calls can use it. It takes minutes to set the functionality. It functions well with current IVRs and doesn’t require any integration.

To quickly respond to frequently asked caller queries, businesses can create a knowledge base. Even in cases where a live person is unable to answer, the caller and the company benefit from the combined capabilities, which maximizes the value of each call.

By providing a self-service site that is user-friendly and customized to meet the demands of business customers, Onvego provides telephone service providers with a new source of income for the Smart Receptionist.

“At Onvego, we put a lot of effort into making sure our devices are simple to use and quick to set up.” “The high-touch, costly existing telephony channel is brought into the modern era by the Smart Receptionist,” Mr. Ziv continued.

The industry has already recognized the introduction of the Smart Receptionist as a major advancement. “Phone.com and our customers will benefit greatly from the Onvego Smart Receptionist,” stated Phone.com CEO Ari Rabban. “Without the expense and complexity usually associated with such revolutionary technology, it will allow us to bring the advantages of AI to even the smallest of businesses.”

“An important milestone has been reached in Intel’s efforts to establish itself as the leading chip supplier for AI PCs: the company announced that over 500 AI models have been optimized for its Core Ultra processors.”

The AI models, according to the Santa Clara, California-based company, cover “more than 20 categories of AI, including large language, diffusion, super resolution, object detection, and computer vision,” as of Wednesday. These models are available from industry partners Hugging Face, PyTorch, ONNX Model Zoo, and OpenVINO Model Zoo.

These include Google’s Bert natural language understanding model, Microsoft’s Phi-2 small language model, Meta’s Llama large language model, OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition model, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 1.5 text-to-image generation model, and the Mistral language model.

Models “form the backbone of AI-enhanced software features like object removal, image super resolution, or text summarization,” according to Intel, which highlights the significance of its optimization work. It further stated that the models are compatible with the Core Ultra’s neural processing unit (NPU), GPU, and CPU.

According to the company, “the breadth of user-facing AI features that can be brought to market and the number of enabled/optimized models are directly correlated.” It is impossible to design a feature without a model. The feature cannot operate at its peak efficiency without runtime optimization.

The semiconductor giant is in an arms race with rivals AMD and Qualcomm to not only provide the best processors for AI PCs but also to enable compelling software experiences with the goal of creating greater demand for their respective products.

Along with the AI model optimization project, Intel has been developing over 300 AI-powered features for PCs with Core Ultra processors in collaboration with more than 100 independent software vendors (ISVs). In December, the company released its Core Ultra lineup; this is being done as part of its AI PC Acceleration Program, which was started a few months prior.

The company stated that the work it has done to establish AI PCs as a new device category and the investments it has made in client AI processing, framework optimizations, AI tools like OpenVINO, and other related areas have made its software enablement work possible.

Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of AI and technical marketing in Intel’s Client Computing Group, said in a statement, “This unmatched selection reflects our commitment to building not only the PC industry’s most robust toolchain for AI developers, but a rock-solid foundation AI software users can implicitly trust.”