TechTouch Asia

Geekplus, which has held the top market share in Japan for four consecutive years in automated guided vehicles (AGV), has selected the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to automate its smart logistics platform. Geekplus was established in Japan in 2017 as a joint venture between Beijing Geekplus Technology Company, a unicorn with the world's largest market share in autonomous mobile robots (AMR), and Japanese capital. The company contributes to improving the corporate value of logistics companies by providing services such as sales, installation, 24 x 7 x 365 maintenance, and productivity improvement consulting. It has customers in retail, apparel, pharmaceuticals, automotive, lithium batteries, photovoltaics, electronics, and more in thousands of locations worldwide, and approximately a hundred in Japan.  The company wanted to expand and generate new revenue streams to lead the company into its next phase of growth. One such revenue-enhancing project is a smart logistics platform built...

The NVIDIA Omniverse platform, which enables the development of metaverse applications, is expanding with Blender enhancements and a suite of experimental generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools for 3D artists. Source: NVIDIA blog post. Animated 3D graphics created using Omniverse . At CES, NVIDIA announced the new features, as well as Omniverse preinstallation on NVIDIA Studio laptops and thousands of new, free Universal Scene Description (USD) assets to help accelerate adoption of 3D workflows. A new release for Blender, now available in the Omniverse Launcher, is bringing 3D generative AI capabilities to Blender users. A new panel lets Blender users transfer shape keys and rigged characters easily. The challenge of reattaching a rigged character’s head can now be solved with a one-button operation from Omniverse Audio2Face — an AI-enabled tool that automatically generates realistic facial expressions from an audio file. In addition, Audio2Face, Audio2Gesture and Audio2Emot...

Source: OMRON. The i-DMP processes and analyses data from production sites. OMRON has upgraded its i-BELT Data Management Platform ( DMP ), which comes with the i-BELT  manufacturing site data management service. The refreshed platform provides manufacturers with quicker access to the i-BELT service and the ability to introduce new capabilities. The i-BELT service addresses gaps in using field data to improve productivity and product quality, for instance with attaining carbon neutrality. According to OMRON, many manufacturers have said: “We’ve visualised the energy data, but we don’t know where to start to seek solutions. We also find it difficult to connect data-gathering software and devices to existing systems.” The i-DMP now allows manufacturers can now integrate energy data and productivity data to produce an indicator for energy productivity. OMRON is making use of the i-DMP at OMRON Kyoto Taiyo Company, where it is deployed at a factory that employs persons with disabil...

Microsoft has announced the general availability of the Azure OpenAI Service as part of Microsoft's continued commitment to democratising artificial intelligence (AI). The move rides on an ongoing partnership with OpenAI. Businesses can apply for access to advanced AI models via the Azure OpenAI Service including GPT-3.5, Codex , and DALL•E 2 , backed by the trusted enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimised infrastructure of Microsoft Azure , to create cutting-edge applications. Customers will also be able to access ChatGPT —a finetuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure—through the Azure OpenAI Service soon. The service has been used to enhance customer support, customisation, and the generation of insights from data using search, data extraction, and classification. "At Moveworks, we see Azure OpenAI Service as an important component of our machine learning architecture. It enables us to solve several novel u...