LIVE FROM QUALCOMM SNAPDRAGON TECH SUMMIT 2017, MAUI: Baidu partnered with Qualcomm to add the DuerOS voice assistant to Snapdragon as part of the Chinese internet giant’s lofty aspirations for its artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Kun Jing, general manager of Baidu DuerOS (pictured), said more than 40 products using the voice technology have shipped in the space of a year and it picked up more than 130 partners since launch. It features in homes, cars and on mobile devices, and is the “most vibrant” voice ecosystem in China.

“This is not enough. Why? Because we want every chipset to have this capability by default, and that’s why today we are super-happy to announce our strategic collaboration combining with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform. We are bringing this on-device AI pre-installed, pre-optimised, on Snapdragon platform, so for our partners, for every Qualcomm chipset, they will have this capability,” the executive said.

“For DuerOS in China, we already partner with a lot of OEMs, Huawei, Xaiomi, and other brands…So by announcing the new voice solution we hope for every smart device in the coming years will by default have this voice capability and enable everyone to communicate and interact with machines very naturally,” he added.

The partnership will see DuerOS optimised for Qualcomm’s Aqstic hardware and software to offer a complete AI voice assistant for smartphones and IoT devices. This will include always-on, low power, voice activation using Aqstic audio codecs, and echo cancellation and noise suppression to improve the performance of DuerOS devices powered by Snapdragon.

An optimised DuerOS reference application will be made available for future software releases on Snapdragon mobile platforms. The roadmap includes Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm’s next flagship processor.

Intuitive
The executive said voice is an important interface for Chinese users, in that it is more natural with low learning barriers.

“If we look at the past, we see that how people interact with machines changes over time, and each change basically shifts the whole industry,” he explained.

“For Chinese users, the layout of a keyboard is very unfamiliar, so the layout of the characters is actually random to a lot of Chinese users. But we still have many, many users of PCs accessing content on the internet.”

“In the mobile era, we’ve seen tremendous growth in the whole industry because the interaction is so much more natural than the keyboard. People use fingers to interact with the devices, which is much more convenient for Chinese users to access information,” the executive continued, adding: “In the AI era, voice will be a much simpler and more natural interaction, that will let everyone in every location interact with every device.”