Microsoft And Xiaomi Announced A Partnership To Develop AI Smart Speakers

A new memorandum of understanding has been signed by Microsoft and Xiaomi to finally acknowledge their earlier partnership. The new partnership includes that the two companies can work together in developing and using cloud computing, AI technologies and hardware manufacturing sector.

The new partnership between the two giants is an unprecedented step in the cooperation history between US and Chinese companies to develop artificial intelligence. This area has not seen major successful partnerships over the past years, although the two countries are the largest markets of artificial intelligence technologies and services.

According to the memorandum of understanding, the American giant will allow using its cloud computing products by Xiaomi to develop modern developed smartphones, laptops and other smart devices such as smart speakers, and brings them to the international markets. On the other hand, Xiaomi will help Microsoft to achieve larger spread in the Chinese market.

The partnership also includes discussions about supporting Xiaomi’s cheap smart speaker, Mi AI, with the digital assistant, Cortana. This move comes as a reflection of Microsoft’s desire for a further deployment of Cortana, which has only been released in one smart speaker, Harman Kardon Invoke, which is struggling to compete with other smartphones supported by the most popular digital assistants, Alexa by Amazon and Assistant by Google.

Beside smart speakers, the discussions also includes working on developing other products based on Microsoft AI technologies, like conversational and speech AI. Beside other services such as Bing search engine, Edge browser and the famous video call app, Skype.

The new partnership between Microsoft and Xiaomi is a new part of the cooperation started 2015, when Microsoft announced that windows 10 will be tested on some of Xiaomi products. Microsoft’s interest in Xiaomi is that, according to statistics, it was ranked fifth among the biggest smartphone vendors behind Apple, Samsung and Huawei. The Chinese company sold 92.4 million smartphones in 2017.