[ad_1]
Extensive databases underpin Tmall Genie's system, Alibaba's Intelligent Voice Assistant, which responds to Amazon's Echo, providing it with encyclopedic information and billions of dialog sessions. However, the savvy speaker does not quite know that Alibaba's AI Labs hopes to catch up with a recent investment in R & D of $ 15 million: the recognition of the Chinese dialect.
According to Alibaba's official press release, Genie is "China's best-selling voice-controlled loudspeaker, the only market on which it is currently available. Powered by AliGenie, the device is able to understand commands in Mandarin Chinese, the most used language in the world. "
Except that in huge parts of the country, Mandarin is not necessarily their language of choice. Although the Chinese language is generally divided into five major groups, there are up to 200 dialects used in the country. And they are rarely intelligible to each other – a person speaking the Minnan dialect, common in some parts of Fujian Province, will probably not be understood by a Cantonese speaker, for example.
To carry out this project, Alibaba has established partnerships with language experts, universities and other institutions and has already started to build a dialect database based on Tmall Genie dialogue samples. They will focus first on the Sichuan dialect and then diversify from there.
Hey, maybe Kafe Hu can help?
Watch: OG Chengdu rapper Kafe Hu dispels Sichuan slang
Alibaba said in January that it has sold 5 million Tmall Genies since 2017, and Xiaomi's voice badistant, XiaoAi – for whom Xiaomi is also working on recognizing dialects – has pushed the envelope with new features such as the touch screen. .
The competition is clearly getting stronger and, even though it seems a little strange to announce a major investment to help your technology learn more languages the same week as your flagship delivery service. was accused of using its application to secretly listen to users' conversations, the dialect The recognition feature would be a valuable badet to a product whose popularity seems to grow in China – especially since the Genie program is integrated in BMW cars.
Cover picture: Alizila
[ad_2]
Source link
