Yue Guofeng, Vice GM of Baidu Mobile・ Cloud Computing division lately said at an event that the Chinese search titan would soon launch its own Siri-like personal assistant, probably in this month.
Speech recognition wouldn’t be a major problem for Baidu, Yue said so since the company had made some work beforehand, thinking of the voice input feature added into Baidu mobile search lately. “Voice and Visual are the two most natural interactions. Face recognition has been applied to Baidu Album, and in the future we’d love to explore more on that front, including technologies like AR. ”
iFlytek, a Chinese company already had similar offerings earlier this year dubbed iFlytek Yudian. The company’s speech-recognition technology comes with an accuracy rate of more than 90% in terms of Mandarin Chinese. Other than accuracy, it could also do lots of chores for you, just like your personal assistant at hand. For example, you can tell the phone to “text Ben, let’s have dinner tomorrow night 8”, it will translate your speech to texts and ask for your confirmation before sending out.
Yue didn’t reveal further details on how Baidu’s Siri would work though.
News via Tencent Tech report