Useful Sensors this week launched a new crowdfunding campaign to improve a natural language processing (NLP) system built on a small Rockchip single-board computer.
The "AI-in-a-box" module, made on Rockchip's off-the-shelf hardware, understands natural language, responds to queries and generates text.
Developed in September 2023, Useful Sensors' AI-In-A-Box NLP module uses the Useful Transformers framework with off-the-shelf hardware components combined with proprietary software. The crowdfunded version of the system will come in a custom case so it can be "put on the kitchen table to subtitle a conversation or brought to a meeting and plugged into the HDMI output for real-time translation," Worden said, adding that anyone who knows how to write in Python will be able to use the text stream delivered by other means.
Useful Sensors is also working on new sensor modules, an improvement on the "human sensor." The sensor is a postage stamp-sized board with a camera on the front panel and an Espressif Systems ESP32-S3 microcontroller with wireless connectivity on the back. The second similar board is made on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller with an LG camera and is designed to read QR codes.