Watch out, Alexa, Baidu’s voice assistant is catching up

Watch out, Alexa, here comes Baidu’s voice assistant. China’s Baidu, Inc. has announced that the install base of DuerOS, the company’s conversational AI assistant, reached 100 million devices, doubling over the past 6 months.

“DuerOS leverages Baidu’s leading AI technologies and a vast content ecosystem to provide unmatched user experience in conversational AI. We are seeing voice input gaining huge adoption in China. By leveraging Baidu’s AI technology, which has the largest indexing of Chinese webpages and a better multi-modal semantic understanding of the Chinese language, DuerOS is uniquely positioned for the shift to conversational AI in China,” said Kun Jing, General Manager of Baidu’s Smart Living Group, in a press release.

voice assistants

DuerOS offers 1st-party devices as well as developer tool kits & turnkey solutions to enable OEMs to easily integrate AI capabilities into their devices, such as TV set-top boxes, children’s storytelling machines, smart speakers & home appliances. In June 2018, Baidu launched the Xiaodu Smart Speaker, selling out 10,000 units within the first 90 seconds it was available Online. 2 months prior, Baidu released Xiaodu Video Smart Speaker in partnership with Ainemo Inc., garnering overwhelmingly positive customer reviews.

The DuerOS platform has attracted over 200 partners, is powering over 110 models of smart devices & has a community of over 16,000 skills developers. DuerOS has formed partnerships with leading smartphone brands, including Huawei, Vivo and OPPO, which have integrated DuerOS conversational AI capabilities into several of their flagship phone models.

According to the Smartphones: Global Artificial Intelligence Technologies Forecast: 2010 to 2023 report published in July 2018, Strategy Analytics, a leading market research & consulting firm, described DuerOS as “the fastest rising assistant from China” & suggested that it may become the 2nd largest smartphone virtual assistant in the world behind Google Assistant in the next few years.

Baidu, Inc. is the leading Chinese language Internet search provider.

Image Credit: Baidu
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