Japan's NTT Group has announced a pair of investments through its NTT Docomo Ventures investment division aimed at enhancing the group's AI portfolio.
NTT Docomo Ventures has made an investment in Osaka-based ArchiTek, a company that specializes in semiconductor circuit and software design for AI and image processing.
ArchiTek's technology is designed to enable high-speed, low-power AI processing for image analytics and deep learning, making it applicable in a range of areas including IoT devices and other edge computing components.
NTT Group plans to work on incorporating the technology into IoT solutions offered for its customers.
Meanwhile NTT Ventures has invested in Silicon Valley-based natural language processing and semantic search engine technology developer Inbenta Technologies.
NTT Group company NTT Communications last year launched service brand COTOHA Chat & FAQ using Inbenta's semantic search engine. The rand offers a customer chat support system and FAQ database generating service based on AI.
NTT Com plans to leverage the investment by pursuing closer collaboration with Inbenta in order to strengthen its AI business.