In October of 2019, Google announced that Coral has finally transitioned from its beta phase to a global release. Coral is an amalgamation of hardware development kits and accessories, which is built to aid the development machine learning models.
While previously the beta version of Coral was only launched in specific regions, it is now available for a wider audience and users. All of the Coral products, which include: Coral Dev Board for $150, Coral USB Accelerator for $72.99, and 5-megapixel camera accessory for $24.99 are now available for purchase at electronic retailer Mouser and also via sales team of Google.
Along with these products, the official website of Coral: Coral.ai has also been revamped with improved management of tools and docs, dedicated pages to industries and testimonials. The website also provides website visitors with links to a set of examples, focused on offering solutions to the most common AI problems including: object detection, keyword spotting, image classification and pose estimation.
Vikram Tank who is the product manager of Coral while talking about Coral mentioned,
“We’ve received a lot of feedback over the past six months and used it to improve our platform. Coral is also at the core of new applications of local AI in industries ranging from agriculture to health care to manufacturing … [It’s] already delivering impact across industries, and several of our partners are including Coral in products that require fast ML inferencing at the edge”.
“We’ve received a lot of feedback over the past six months and used it to improve our platform. Coral is also at the core of new applications of local AI in industries ranging from agriculture to health care to manufacturing … [It’s] already delivering impact across industries, and several of our partners are including Coral in products that require fast ML inferencing at the edge”.
The Coral Dev Board is essentially a miniature computer, which features a system-on-module (can be removed) with one of the custom-made tensor processing unit (TPU) AI chips of Coral. These Edge TPUs are not similar to the chips responsible for accelerating the algorithms in the data centers of Google.
They are actually liquid-cooled and built to slot into the server racks are used for powering core products of Google such as Google Search results, Google Cloud Vision API and Google Photos. Edge TPUs only have a size of one fourth of a penny, they manage offline and local calculations, and help the orthodox microcontrollers and sensors. The Coral USB Accelerator is a USB dongle. It has been built to boost the machine learning inference on the Linux and Raspberry Pi systems.
About Coral
Coral is an ecosystem for the local AI, according to the official website. It helps you in making your ideas of on-device AI applications into realities. Right from the prototype phase to production phase, Coral helps developers in creating their AI application.
Coral offers software tools, pre-complied models and even hardware components to developers so that they can build devices using local AI.