Sarah Tew/CNET

Google is planning to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to the diminutive Raspberry Pi this year.

"Google is going to arrive in style in 2017. The tech titan has exciting plans for the maker community," said The Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The advertising-to-cloud-computing giant intends to make a range of smart tools available this year, according to the Foundation. "Google's range of AI and machine learning technology could enable makers to build even more powerful projects," it said.

Google has developed a huge range of tools for machine learning, IoT, wearables, robotics, and home automation, and it wants Raspberry Pi fans to fill out a survey that will help it to understand what tools to provide.

The survey mentions face- and emotion-recognition and speech-to-text translation, as well as natural language processing and sentiment analysis.

"The tech giant also provides powerful technology for navigation, bots, and predictive analytics. The survey will help them get a feel for the Raspberry Pi community, but it'll also help us get the kinds of services we need," said the Foundation.

The tiny, low-cost Raspberry Pi boards have been an unexpected runaway success, selling over ten million even though the developers only ever expected to sell 1,000. The original aim was to inspire more students to take up computer science, but the Pi has had a far wider impact than that.

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