The Los Angeles Post

A glimpse of Baidu artificial intelligent system DuerOS

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In January, Baidu named former Microsoft Corp. executive Qi Lu as its chief operating officer, with a mandate to reshape the company around such technologies as deep learning, augmented reality, and image recognition. Mr. Qi Lu said, Baidu will “all in AI” and continues to emphasize AI. Baidu’s AI strategy will be empowered by DuerOS (conversational AI operating system), Apollo (autonomous driving system), and Baidu Brain and cloud computing.

 

DuerOS is cooperating with partners to support several smart devices. It also enables hardware to interactive with humans verbally, to hear your command, understand your demand, and satisfy your needs. Baidu expects DuerOS to be a leading operating system in an IoT (internet of things) world.

 

Chinese search giant acquired Raven Tech, a Chinese start-up focusing on artificial intelligence and next-generation operating systems in February. This week, Raven Tech released a big update on their AI operating system “OKMAN”.  This shows Raven’s  work with the Duer team on new product development. OK MAN 2.0 version has been accessed to Baidu’s artificial intelligence system DuerOS, and has done a depth of custom development for the Raven H-1, launched in December 2016, a Lego-like smart home assistant launched hat users could customize different molds for different purposes.

 

First, Users are no longer limited to using the fixed wake-up word provided by the developer like “Hi Siri”, but can customize any of their favorite names to wake Raven’s device. Once the wake-up word is changed, the user does not need to do any repetitive training.

 

Second, As the main function of the smart speaker, music streaming has been improved dramatically under OK MAN 2.0 version. While listening to a song before, you have to use the wake-up word for the next step. In the new version, when the music is playing, the user can directly say the command, “next, play, pause” without saying the wake-up word again. The improvement of this function finally makes people feel that talking to the speaker is no longer so cumbersome. Moreover,  music response speed has been greatly optimized. Users now only need about 1.5 seconds to hear what they want after saying their instructions. This response speed is ahead of other market products.

 

Third, users can pick their favorite voice in this version. OK MAN’s voice can be changed to male, female, child and even cartoon characters sound. Raven and Baidu technical team has been achieved voice adjustment on multi-dimensional parameters.

 

Fourth, OKMAN 2.0 version has integrated Baidu food delivery service. Users could directly say “burger” or “chicken tender”, then H-1 will automatically push the menu search result to user’s mobile phone and put food on the shopping cart. The restaurant that contains all the ordered would be preferred.

 

Behind this update,  it is a new integration of technology and user interaction. Compared to the advantages of Baidu in artificial intelligence, Raven as a start-up company shows its advantages in hardware design, user interaction and human nature of thinking.

 

Raven and DuerOS will launch a new generation of intelligent hardware by the end of this year. Only in this month, we have seen Alibaba, Lenovo and Xiaomi released new products in smart speaker area. And we’ll see which company will finally make a hit in China. (Written by Yansong Liu, Source: www.Chinese.Capital)