Baidu Debuts Siri-like Service

Chinese search engine Baidu just launched its own approach to Siri with the debut of ‘YuYinZhuShou’ (or Voice Assistant in English). You can control your smartphone via the app by your voice to do a lot of things like making phone calls, sending texts, searching for information, downloading apps, opening links in browser and so on, to name just a few.

Baidu claimed that it integrated a technology named DNN (Deep Neural Network) into the app and mistakes of speech recognition would be reduced by 25%, which means the accuracy of speech recognition are better improved.

It’s the future trend that search engines dip their toes into the field of voice searching. These homegrown voice-searching systems might be better than Apple’s Siri in three aspects. First, some search engines are more experienced in voice recognition and prediction of user intention from their long-time operation. Secondly, search engines have access to data on various open platforms, including weather, flight information, food searching, etc. And thirdly, big search engine has its own knowledge-graph system that could be leveraged to ramp up accuracy in understanding and answering users’ questions.

Google also had its own answer to Siri, Google Now, a service that benefits from its deep integration with Google search.