7 Innovations By Baidu Which Changed The Face Of AI

Compared to other countries, China has become one of the leading artificial intelligence innovators in the world. By investing big bucks in emerging technologies, the country has shown potential for becoming the global AI leader. And this has become possible because of the Chinese tech giants who are striving hard to make every possible move towards a smart society.

Chinese multinational technology company Baidu, which specialises in Internet-related services and artificial intelligence-powered solutions, has been doing a lot in this sector. The tech giant offers a number of services and one of its popular services is the Baidu Chinese search engine which is considered as the second-largest search engine in the world and holds a 76.05% market share in China's search engine market.

In this article, we list down the top innovations in artificial intelligence by Baidu.

1| Apollo

Apollo is a high performance, flexible architecture which accelerates the development, testing, and deployment of Autonomous Vehicles. It was announced at CES 2019 as the most advanced and open-sourced autonomous driving platform. The tech giant claims that this platform has the ability to manage speed bumps, clear zones, narrow lanes, unprotected turns and much more. The Apollo Enterprise includes fully autonomous mini-buses, autonomous valet parking, intelligent map data service platform and DuerOS.

2| Duer

In 2015, Baidu launched its intelligent personal assistant, Duer which can also be called the Chinese version of Apple Siri. Duer includes multi-modal interaction, natural language processing, and other such technologies for a natural interaction and smarter understanding. 

3| Deep Speech

Deep Speech is a state-of-the-art speech recognition system developed using end-to-end deep learning by Baidu Research. This system is a combination of a language model which is capable of outperforming existing state-of-the-art recognition pipelines in two challenging scenarios which are clear, conversational speech and speech in noisy environments.  

4| DuerOS

DuerOS is a conversational artificial intelligence open operating system developed by Baidu Duer Business Unit. It can be considered as one of the leading applications of Baidu's AI technology which delivers solutions with the help of natural language processing (NLP) by allowing the users to command and converse with their devices.

5| Deep Voice

Deep Voice is a real-time Neural Text-to-Speech system developed by the Chinese tech giant in 2017. The Deep Voice project was started to revolutionize human-technology interactions by applying modern deep learning techniques to artificial speech generation. This production-quality text-to-speech system is constructed entirely from deep neural networks and it comprises five major building blocks which are a segmentation model for locating phoneme boundaries, a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion model, a phoneme duration prediction model, a fundamental frequency prediction model, and an audio synthesis model.

6| Little Fish

Jointly developed by Baidu and Ainemo Inc., Little Fish or Xiaodu Zaijia is a smart video speaker and the winner of the Best Smart Home Product Award at CES Asia 2018. This smart speaker with a screen and home functions aims to help close the distance between family members and let people enjoy time at home. 

7| SwiftScribe

SwiftScribe is an AI-powered transcription software developed by Baidu Silicon Valley Lab (SVAIL). The basic function of SwiftScribe is to transcribe audio material into the text in order to solve the problem of consuming a large amount of time-by-word dictation. This web application is based on Deep Speech 2 and supports uploading .wav or .mp3 files up to 1 hour long. It uses artificial intelligence for transcription and currently, it only supports English transcription.