ASUS Announces Azure Percept Collaboration with Microsoft

TAIPEI, Taiwan, April 28, 2021 — ASUS today announced a new collaboration between the ASUS IoT business unit and Microsoft Azure Edge Devices, Platforms, & Services on the launch of Azure Percept DK — a comprehensive development kit for creating AIoT edge solutions with Microsoft Azure Percept.
The partnership is focused on developing AI solutions for edge devices. Specifically, the new ASUS Azure Percept DK provides a comprehensive edge AI platform for users, enabling the creation of edge AIoT solutions.

Converting existing cloud-based AI models to work with edge solutions can be a complex process — and one that Azure Percept DK is designed to overcome. Powered by Microsoft Azure Percept, Azure Percept DK helps customers to break through the difficulties to quickly and easily prototype scenario-based edge AI solutions.
“Azure Percept offers an end-to-end blueprint for building and training responsible edge AI solutions,” commented Roanne Sones, Corporate Vice President. “Microsoft Azure Percept Studio hosts a collection of fully managed Azure services with added security, integrated for simple-to-use device provisioning and edge-AI-lifecycle management, giving developers a full suite of services designed to be deployed on edge hardware.”

Azure Percept DK by ASUS is a pilot-ready development kit deeply integrated to work with Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning and Azure IoT management services. The development kit includes a carrier board based on an Arm® Cortex-A53 system-on-chip (SoC) and Azure Percept Vision, made for prototyping scenario-based AI solutions.
Specifically, the carrier board is a single-board computer (SBC) with an NXP® i.MX 8M quad-core CPU at its heart. It also includes a WiFi module and a discrete Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip, both on pre-installed modules, for secure data transfers and over-the-air (OTA) updates. Azure Percept Vision, a camera module integrated with Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X accelerator, ready for vision-based AI inference at the edge.
Azure Percept DK can also be extended with Azure Percept Audio, a hardware accessory with preconfigured four-mic linear array that work with the Microsoft Azure service to enable custom speech-based functions.