Sigfox and Coral join forces to spark IoT innovation with AI at the edge

Sigfox, the 0G network pioneer and a leading IoT (Internet of Things) communication service provider, has announced its partnership with Coral, Google's platform of hardware components, software tools, and models for building devices with Artificial Intelligence at the edge.

As further sectors integrate IoT devices into their activities, more data than ever is being collected and industry leaders are struggling to find fast and cost-efficient ways to transport and harness it.

To solve this challenge, Coral provides the technology to run a machine learning model locally, at the edge, without needing to send large amounts of data to the cloud.

The addition of Sigfox to the Coral Partnership Program will create room for innovation with the possibility to integrate the Coral Edge TPU™ in an IoT device, making it possible to run inferences locally and capture completely new information from the field. This reduces costs and minimizes energy usage.

Once the raw data is processed and its value has been harvested at the device edge, the Sigfox 0G network will transport it rapidly and at a very low cost to the customer's platform.

The innovations from this new partnership will be applicable to a number of industrial use cases such as smart buildings, traffic monitoring and anomaly detection. For example, Coral-enabled sensors can help understand population flow in parks, streets, workplaces, or retail centers while preserving people’s privacy using local AI, a fast, reliable process that keeps user data out of reach. Feeding that data into a larger model can help distribute shared resources efficiently and improve incident response.

The combination of local AI and IoT can also come in handy on a production line, where users can extract data from long HD video streams and detect product defects. The cost to do this is typically very high but using Coral’s solution coupled with Sigfox devices and 0G network, costs and latency will be reduced, while data privacy is improved by enabling data refinement upstream. 

“At Coral, we believe efficient AI starts with enabling capabilities at the edge. The Coral Partner Program is intended to expand the edge AI ecosystem with our partners to support a broader range of industrial, IoT and cloud-based solutions by enabling deployment at these edge nodes. The addition of Sigfox to our ecosystem does this by allowing engineers to leverage the Sigfox 0G network, making gathering and streaming the right data from remote, low power or low connectivity settings easier without having to sacrifice efficiency or privacy along the way.” said Ajay K. Nair, Product Evangelist, Machine Learning Solutions at Google.

“After signing a partnership with Google Cloud earlier this year, we are delighted to start a collaboration with Coral and are looking forward to developing new solutions that will help all kinds of industries harvest the true value of their data,” said Guillaume Simenel, VP Product and Strategic Partners at Sigfox.