Release the first artificial intelligence hardware Baidu opens the era of ＂AI home robot＂

Baidu, defined as "AI company", has shown its AI ability to the outside world this time and has penetrated into every drop of its blood.

On November 16th, 2017 Baidu World Congress was held in Beijing, and a number of software and hardware products such as mobile phone Baidu 10.0 and new artificial intelligence hardware "raven H" were released. This conference attracted many developers and eco-partners.

I have been deeply involved in artificial intelligence technology for many years. In Baidu’s own applications and the corresponding products of its partners, Baidu’s AI technology is making everything easier. Baidu’s self-driving open platform Apollo, Baidu Brain, DuerOS 2.0, mobile phone Baidu, iQiyi and other new technology applications made a new appearance at this conference.

In Li Yanhong’s view, the technical ability of artificial intelligence is rapidly improving, and it is increasingly able to enter various practical fields. Therefore, how to promote the productization of AI in all directions, accelerate the commercialization of AI, and let AI enter everyone’s life faster has become the focus of this conference.

Judging from the function of raven H, the first intelligent hardware released by Baidu, raven H equipped with Duer OS 2.0 can be directly awakened, playing music and iQiyi videos through voice operation, turning on TV, controlling the switch of lights, adjusting air conditioning, and answering 100,000 questions. Like the "one more thing" session of Apple’s product launch, Baidu also announced "Two More Things": Raven R and raven Q, two smart hardware to be released soon. From the logic of H to Q, it can be seen that raven H has gone beyond the definition of smart speakers in the past, and it is more like an AI home robot from front-end hardware to terminal technology platform to full coverage of functional services.

In the eyes of the industry, the acceleration of AI home robots and unmanned driving is only a microcosm of the acceleration of Baidu AI commercialization. Baidu AI technology has taken the lead in finding various scenarios. From investing a huge amount of money in research and development, attracting many world-class top AI scientists, and now the products bear fruit, Baidu, which has been grinding a sword for several years, has finally formed a complete AI ecological closed loop.

Baidu’s export DuerOS exchange system is committed to empowering everything and providing integrated software and hardware solutions. Li Yanhong has said more than once that artificial intelligence products combining software and hardware will be the new direction.

After being acquired by Baidu at the beginning of the year, Raven Technology shouldered the mission of landing AI home products, and tried various explorations to provide Baidu with the soft and hard integration of AI technology. At this conference, raven H, Baidu’s first artificial intelligence hardware product, finally unveiled the mystery.

At the press conference, Baidu didn’t compare it with the previous smart speakers too much, which was different from the previous smart speaker products in terms of appearance and design concept. Based on Baidu DuerOS platform, raven H needs to do a smart home brain. With the brand-new "DuerOS 2.0" kernel and Baidu’s huge database, raven H has reached a new height in the use experience. You can play music, turn on the TV, control the switch of lights, adjust the air conditioner and answer 100,000 questions by moving your mouth.

In fact, if we look at the whole global AI market, Google, Amazon and Apple have launched or updated new smart speaker products one after another since this year. In the domestic market, Alibaba, Iflytek and Xiaomi all have corresponding products, and the commercialization process in the voice field has started to land first.

Another special feature of Baidu raven H this time is that it provides it with expandability. Raven also announced two other upcoming products, raven R and raven Q, at the meeting. Raven R is an upgraded version of the flexible movement of raven H and the world’s first six-axis automatic emotional robot. Raven Q is a hardware form with mature face recognition, computer vision and Apollo autopilot. In fact, raven H has gone beyond the definition of smart speakers in the past, and it is more like a family robot in form.

At the Baidu World Congress, DuerOS 2.0 operating system was also ushered in. In the way of man-machine exchange, it does achieve "Baidu knows you better", and it is not necessary to say wake-up words every time you wake up. Li Yanhong said that most smart speakers on the market today, when you communicate with it, although you don’t need to trigger the button, you still need a wake-up word, which is still not a natural way of interaction. In daily communication, you don’t have to hold your hand to talk to you, and you don’t have to call your name every time you say something.

Based on the core competence of Baidu AI technology, Baidu focuses on the layout of AI application ecology and opens two platforms, Due-rOS and Apollo. Among them, Baidu DuerOS platform takes voice as the entrance, builds and opens the full-stack capability of voice interaction from hardware to software, and is committed to building the key nodes of smart home and Internet of Everything in the future. Expand the ability of intelligent voice interaction to more intelligent hardware, further lower the threshold of intelligent hardware development, and empower artificial intelligence to traditional manufacturing. At present, it has successively reached cooperation with giants such as Haier, Midea and Lenovo, and this time Baidu also ushered in the first AI hardware.

At the 2016 Baidu World Congress, Baidu’s artificial intelligence platform "Baidu Brain" was released, which integrates four capabilities: voice, image, natural language processing and user portrait. At the AI conference in July, Baidu announced the opening of the most complete AI platform in China — — Baidu Brain+intelligent cloud, which basically covers all technical fields of known artificial intelligence, carries many application scenarios.

Over the past year, Baidu’s four brain abilities have evolved rapidly and its application scale has expanded rapidly. At present, Baidu Brain has opened more than 80 core AI capabilities, the number of developers accessing Baidu AI open platform has exceeded 370,000, and the number of calls of Baidu Brain by internal and external products has reached 218.8 billion times a day.

The four basic abilities of Baidu’s brain-speech recognition, image recognition, natural language understanding and user portrait-are now mostly provided to developers in the form of open platforms. Li Yanhong said, "Today, when people use all kinds of apps, household appliances and hardware devices, it is likely that they are calling the ability of Baidu’s brain, but the brand of appearance does not use Baidu brand, but it has been called very frequently."

Baidu’s brain technology progress is also constantly promoting more Baidu product innovation. Li Yanhong demonstrated a driver fatigue monitoring system based on image recognition and other technologies at the conference site, and judged and reminded drivers to avoid fatigue driving through infrared face recognition. Baidu has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with FAW Group to jointly promote the technology products.

Baidu also launched Baidu 10.0, a mobile phone integrating search and information flow. Through the knowledge map and user portrait of Baidu’s 100 billion-level attributes and relationships, Baidu information flow makes information acquisition easier, and through innovative technologies such as voice and AR, information acquisition interaction is more natural and the experience is more real.

According to the latest data, the cumulative activation times of mobile phone Baidu have exceeded 2 billion, the daily average reading volume of information flow has increased by 36% and the daily average broadcast volume of short videos has increased by 38%. Through simpler acquisition, more natural interaction and more real experience, mobile phone Baidu leads the new mobile era with a brand-new information service experience.

At the same time, in the field of video entertainment, iQiyi, an artificial intelligence technology, has realized a series of closed loops, such as intelligent creation, intelligent production, intelligent labeling, intelligent distribution, intelligent playback, intelligent realization and intelligent customer service, to create a video brain. With the ability of traffic prediction, video highlight analysis, video analysis and understanding, and user intent recognition based on deep learning, iQiyi will know more about entertainment, users, content and partners in the new mobile era.

This conference can be seen as a concentrated productization output of Baidu AI capabilities. As the last level of Baidu AI ecology, the mass production of commercial products means that Baidu has completed the top closed loop of artificial intelligence strategy, and the bottom layer of Baidu AI technology, partner level and application landing level are approaching perfection.

Lu Qi, president and chief operating officer of Baidu Group, pointed out: "In the future, Baidu will continue to launch a series of innovative products driven by AI. We will make AI visible and tangible, let AI enter everyone’s life, and make your products more understandable, making the world simpler."

Comment

"Opening" accelerates the arrival of Baidu unmanned vehicles

Baidu unmanned vehicle received a ticket, which may be the first traffic penalty for self-driving cars in China. At the 2017 Baidu World Congress, Li Yanhong, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, didn’t care too much about this, and said, "The driverless ticket has arrived. Will mass production of unmanned vehicles be far behind?"

Accordingly, Baidu is drawing closer to the mass production schedule of driverless cars. Li Yanhong pointed out at the press conference that Baidu plans to cooperate with Jinlong to realize the small-scale mass production and trial operation of unmanned minibuses at the end of July 2018, and jointly launch unmanned vehicles with Jianghuai, BAIC and Chery in 2020. In the industry’s view, Baidu is at the forefront, both in terms of implementation difficulty and domestic development.

The open strategy may be the reason why Baidu’s unmanned vehicle mass production can land so quickly. In many fields of artificial intelligence technology, Baidu has always adopted an attitude of actively empowering and achieving self-improvement.

In the same way that Microsoft’s Windows desktop operating system and Google’s Android mobile operating system rose, Baidu did not choose to "build a car behind closed doors". "Baidu will All in AI. Our core strategy in the AI ​ ​ era is open empowerment. Our future must be based on a win-win situation with every developer." Lu Qi said at the Baidu AI Technology Conference in July, "The success of developers is the success of Baidu, which is the core value of Baidu AI platform."

At the Shanghai Auto Show on April 19 this year, Baidu announced the launch of the "Apollo Project", an open ecosystem of autonomous driving technology, providing software platform and solution services and taking a platform-based ecosystem model. Baidu intends to make Apollo the "Android in the automotive industry" and the intelligent operating system platform for future cars.

Baidu Apollo plans to provide a complete set of software and hardware and service solutions to partners in the automotive industry and autonomous driving, including vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data service. "Opening up" allows more enterprises to enter the market, and "empowering" the ability to integrate software and hardware, enabling Baidu and its partners to jointly accelerate the coming of the era of intelligent driving.

In September, Baidu upgraded the autopilot platform Apollo, and plans to invest 10 billion yuan in three years, complete more than 100 related autopilot industry investments, obtain resources through capital investment, connect with Apollo ecologically, and reduce obstacles to mass production of self-driving cars in hardware.

The data shows that since the opening of Apollo at the beginning of the year, more than 6,000 developers around the world have voted for the Apollo project on the open source software hosting platform Github, more than 1,700 partners have used Apollo open source code, and more than 100 partners have applied for open data.

It can be clearly seen that Internet giants such as Baidu are trying to export AI capabilities through an open platform, lowering the threshold for developers and accelerating the commercial application of artificial intelligence technology in China in different scenarios.

Whether it is DuerOS or Apollo, exporting technology, capabilities and even data will become a key step for Baidu to become an AI open ecological builder. After the precipitation of profound AI technology, opening up has become the path of Baidu AI productization and commercialization.

Text/Chunshan