A report released by cbinsights, a market consulting agency, shows that since 2011, the number of M & A transactions in AI (Artificial Intelligence) has increased seven times. Among them, most start-ups were acquired within 4 years of financing. In 2016, AI start-ups attracted wide attention and attracted us $1.05 billion in the third quarter. Technology giants are increasing their investment in AI research and development in order to benefit from the general trend of transition to the digital market.

Google

Since 2011, one of the most active investors in the AI field is the alphabet of Google's parent company. In the past five years, this company has acquired 11 companies closely related to AI.

Two years ago, Google spent $500 million to acquire the artificial intelligence company deep thinking technology. Deep thinking recently launched the WaveNet service, which can generate the original audio mode and imitate anyone's voice. Compared with the existing text voice system, WaveNet sounds more natural. This means that in the near future, the position of manual telephone customer service may gradually disappear. Google said the technology would be fully open to companies using Google cloud computing services.

Microsoft

In 2016, Microsoft established a venture capital fund to focus on investing in AI companies. With the help of the new chat robot, Microsoft intends not only to expand its intelligent tools, but also to compete with Google in the global market.

In 2016, Microsoft also made a major breakthrough in intelligent translation technology. Microsoft's online real-time translation service was launched and tested. Users can realize on-site translation of multi person, multi language, cross device and face-to-face conversation with the help of personal networked intelligent devices. At present, it supports voice input in 9 languages including Chinese and Mandarin, and text translation in nearly 60 languages.

Amazon

In 2016, Amazon's intelligent voice assistant Alexa caused a sensation after it was launched. It can recognize users' voice queries and respond. At the same time, Amazon announced the launch of a new AI platform, aiming to create a more complex and customizable intelligent system by providing deep learning components to application developers, AI engines and data scientists.

Also last year, Amazon announced that it would soon launch an AI grocery store called Amazon go. In the future, in the Amazon go store, with the help of sensors and artificial intelligence technology, the system will automatically check out as long as customers put their goods in the shopping cart, thus eliminating the waiting time of customers at the cashier.