The internet of things is everywhere now. Almost everyone has at least one connected device at home, likely a virtual assistant and perhaps a smart programmable thermostat. Nearly all new televisions come preinstalled with streaming apps. Even electric vehicles send drivers communications when tire pressure is low or other problems come up.

Smart home appliances aren’t quite as common just yet, but the market is growing rapidly worldwide. And at TecPal, we are helping lead the way.

I’ve had the privilege to work around the world, in Hamburg, Bangkok, and Beijing, and I’ve been in the amazing city of Hong Kong for the past five years. It’s an ideal location for a startup like ours.

I collaborated with a friend from a previous job in mainland China to come up with the idea to start our new venture. He owns a factory that manufactures all kinds of small kitchen appliances and sells them mostly to European retailers. When more and more of his customers started asking about smart appliances, he called me because he knew about my background in IT.

That’s where our idea was born for a more specialized developer of software for smart appliances. Given my friend’s manufacturing expertise and my software experience, we were really more than halfway there before even getting started. That was just four years ago, and today we employ more than 50 people.

We started by adding smart technology to the products his factory produces but realized that what we’re doing could be so much bigger. Why produce smart technology for just a handful of clients when the global market is growing? So now we’re transitioning from creating a customized solution for his products to a software-as-a-service model that can be used in all kinds of smart appliances.

Rapid delivery of custom apps

At TecPal, we started with kitchen appliances, but our software also works in washing machines, ovens, vacuum cleaners, and more. We put everything together in an end-to-end service: hardware integration, cloud services and consumer-facing apps. And the IoT management platform can roll out updates, manage the devices, and ensure their security. Manufacturers and retailers don’t need to know about software development, embedded systems development, cloud development, or mobile development. We can handle that for them so they can stay focused on their core areas of expertise.

Today we have appliances that come preloaded with recipes that are optimized for the appliance so you don’t have to worry about the time, the temperature, and other details. Everything is preset.

We launched multiple IoT products with a major European retailer in 2021 that includes not only preloaded recipes but also user-generated content geared to specific appliances. The Monsieur Cuisine Smart is an advanced multi-cooker utilizing TecPal’s IoT solution. The mobile companion app allows users to control the appliances remotely. They can check the remaining cooking time or stop one of the many cooking programs like kneading, steaming, frying from the living room or from their office across town. The ability to embed content in an appliance is valuable, and so is the ability to control the appliance remotely, but we double down on value by offering both.

Winning with best-in-class IoT technology

Companies in Northeast Asia generally shop around for technology partners based mostly on price, but that’s not us. We chose Google Cloud for the quality of its technology, especially its IoT Core fully managed services. We’re using almost everything in Google Cloud IoT Core, but we’re particularly reliant on the environment for its highly secure two-way device connection and management. We set up some clusters in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and are using that as the underlying virtualization architecture because it allows us to quickly and cost-effectively scale up and down to meet changing customer demands.

We also use Google Cloud Pub/Sub as our message broker to update app statuses automatically and reliably in our back end, for our ETL processes, and for our data pipeline. At the same time, Google Cloud Dataflow is key because it’s a fast, efficient way to funnel all data from different devices and events into BigQuery for data collection, storage, and analytics. BigQuery is a great choice for us because most developers are already familiar with it as a relational database that supports advanced data analytics. We can expand our use of BigQuery without worrying about dimensions, and our new developers can come up to speed quickly on it.

We only end up checking in with a Google Cloud support team once a month, if that. If we don’t find what we’re looking for in documentation, we can just drop them an email. Their response time is excellent.

Beyond the immediate technology advantages we’ve realized by standardizing on Google Cloud, we’re also finding that it helps us win business with big clients in Europe. Google Cloud is an environment that other big businesses know and trust.

We’re still just getting started

We’re already seeing double-digit growth in our market, up to about 25 percent annually. More importantly, there’s a lot of runway in front of us before our growth is expected to plateau.

The market for smart consumer appliances is increasing every day, and there’s a lot of room to reach new regions with new products. Most countertop food processors and slow cookers are still old-fashioned, for instance, but they probably won’t stay that way—especially now that two out of three homeowners say their next appliance purchase will be a smart one.

Together with Google Cloud, we are committed to meeting that demand and exceeding expectations as people embrace new at-home technologies that will make their everyday lives easier.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

When Bigbasket was founded in December 2011, it guaranteed to deliver goods within a one-hour delivery slot of its customers’ choosing or it would refund them 10 percent of their orders. The company also introduced an express service, delivering groceries within 90 minutes of an order being placed.

Bigbasket needed a mapping platform that could help it meet its delivery times, and offer a familiar interface to customers. MediaAgility, a digital consulting company, recommended Google Maps Platform to Bigbasket.

When customers use the Bigbasket mobile app to place orders, they select their locations on a Google Map. The prices and availability of groceries varies according to location, so a customer’s location determines the cost of the order and what can be ordered.

Google Maps Platform Results

• Bigbasket handles more than one million orders per month, and delivers in more than two dozen cities in India
• Bigbasket now has more than four million customers
• Orders are delivered on time, increasing customer loyalty

It is also used to determine driver routes. Bigbasket used the Maps Javascript API to build a web-based app for the company’s backend that tracks all orders and delivery progress. Dispatchers use the Directions API to match drivers with orders and customers, and the Distance Matrix API to get estimate the time of arrival for deliveries. As dispatchers track the progress of deliveries on the map, they can tweak routes as necessary.

“We’ve built Bigbasket from the ground up using Google Maps Platform. It makes sure we have the right customer locations and deliver to them on time. We couldn’t have started Bigbasket without Google Maps. It helps us to be fast and efficient, and make sure our customers get what they’ve ordered quickly,” said Pramod Jajoo, Chief Technology Officer, Bigbasket

At Google Cloud, we’re committed to making artificial intelligence (AI) accessible to everyone and easier to harness for new use cases.  That’s why we’re excited to announce the general availability of our intuitive, new visual user interface for Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text (STT) API, right in Google Cloud Console, which makes the API much simpler and easier for developers to use.  

The STT API lets developers convert speech into text by leveraging Google’s years of research in automatic speech recognition and transcription technology. As advancements in AI continue to bring speech to new interfaces and devices, the STT API helps developers add speech functionality to their applications in order to better meet consumer demands. 

The STT API covers a wide variety of use cases, from dictation and short commands, to captioning and subtitles. Getting the most of STT, however, can be a complicated process. To achieve the highest accuracy on any AI use case requires careful testing and tuning. 

Previously, developers building on the STT API had to do this work manually by carefully experimenting with our API. Just to get started, developers needed familiarity with GCP integration concepts and had to either build their own tools or manage various scripts and API calls to fully understand the API documentation.  These actions required cumbersome and time-consuming effort and made measuring, customizing, and improving models even more difficult.  

Today’s announcement significantly simplifies the process, facilitating iteration and integration of models into developers’ applications by letting developers perform every API function from within the Google Cloud Console.  These tools will make it easier for developers to integrate the STT API with their products or services. This update also gives developers the ability to manage and quickly iterate on their STT model customizations with Model Adaptation.

Model Adaptation allows developers to customize STT specifically for their domains or use cases. Developers can maintain lists of words and weights that will be applied to either every request or just single requests, depending on their needs. Model adaptations are reusable and composable, so once developers have seen good results in the STT Cloud Console, they can deploy to their entire solution. 

The Speech-to-Text Cloud Console and Model Adaptation API is available now in all Google Cloud regions and languages and is accessible to all GCP users with no additional cost to that of the underlying API usage. The STT API supports over 70 languages in 120 different local variants. If you’re a developer looking for an easy to use, easy to integrate, and high-quality STT experience, sign up for our free trial and try our new interface on your own datasets today!