Snips at RustFest Paris 2018!
Note from the organizers: Please enjoy this message from Snips, one of our sponsors.
Today, all of Snips’ embedded code is 100% written in Rust, combining speed with safety to increase the performance even on small devices. As such, we are pleased to be sponsoring and exhibiting at Rustfest 2018!
The team at Paris-based Snips, the leading AI startup focused on voice and privacy, creates voice assistants that can be embedded in a single device or used in a home network to control everything from lights and thermostats to music. Developers and makers can purchase the Snips Maker Kit, a DIY home smart speaker running on a Raspberry Pi, that is capable of delivering the weather report, playing a favorite song, or brewing up a double espresso.
Snips has been focusing exclusively on voice assistants for IoT, commercializing the technology as a white-labeled voice platform for enterprises. Their solution — which runs 100% embedded — enables device manufacturers to add a voice assistant to their products, without sacrificing brand, data and end-user privacy. With the accelerating adoption of voice assistants, the GDPR coming into effect, and the recent Privacy scandals, Snips’ enterprise business has been growing rapidly. Manufacturers like Keecker are adding Snips’ technology to products like multimedia home robots. And Snips works closely with leaders across the value chain, like NVIDIA, EBV, and Analog Devices, in order to voice-enable an increasingly wide range of device types, from speakers and home automation systems to cars.
Snips embeds all the code for a voice assistant onto a single device by using Rust, which offers high performance and low memory overhead as well as memory safety and cross-compilation to different platforms. That made it a great fit for Snips’ use case: embedding code into a range of device types with limited memory and processing power.
“Snips was already using very modern languages for both mobile development and the back end, like Swift, Kotlin, and Scala,” says Mathieu Poumeyrol, Snips Principal Engineer. “That played a big part in convincing our engineers to try Rust.”
Snips Principal Engineer Mathieu Poumeyrol is a fan of Rust’s cross-compilation capability and first-class compiler (rustc), which lets the team write code once and translate it to run well on different machines, without days or weeks of hand-coding rework.
Snips adds new device platforms to its solution every few weeks. The Snips engineering team uses Rust to embed a voice assistant so it runs efficiently and safely on all of their clients’ connected devices, regardless of the operating system and architecture.
“We went all-in on Rust in 2016,” says Snips CTO Joseph Dureau. “And we are very happy with that decision.”
The idea to Make Technology Disappear has been the mission of Snips since its founding in 2013. Although Snips initially started as an AI lab, it eventually went on to become the largest AI startup in France, with privacy as a core principle of the company from Day 1. Snips operates under the thesis that demand for privacy grows proportionally with the number of connected devices we use.
The Snips team is now over 60 people, split between Paris and New York. They are from 14 nationalities, lecturers at top universities, government advisors, women-in-tech advocates, and privacy wonks. Together, they have:
- built and sold dozens of companies
- published numerous papers
- attained PhDs
- conducted academic research in the best universities
- worked at Apple, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Intel, NASA
- have won many awards
Snips is always on the hunt for passionate people who care about contributing to the vision of making technology disappear. More than a company, Snips is a community that values purpose, inclusiveness, curiosity, grit and impact. If you are always learning, a great problem-solver, and team player, you could be a future Snipster! Come chat with Snips at RustFest and apply online at https://snips.welcomekit.co/.