Google is moving to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to the Raspberry Pi, the low-cost credit-card sized computer typically used by schools and the maker community for programming devices.

Google has asked makers to complete a survey about what smart tools would be "most helpful". Th ecompany suggests tools to aid face and emotion recognition, speech-to-text translation, natural language processing and sentiment analysis.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation said the new tools could enable makers "to build even more powerful projects".

"Google is going to arrive in style in 2017. The tech titan has exciting plans for the maker community," said the foundation in its blog.

In 2015, the Raspberry Pi became the most popular British computer ever made. More than 10 million have now been sold.