A personal assistant coming from China
The concept
Duer is an AI personal assistant developed by Baidu. Duer is able to respond to voice queries order food, reserve hotels and give you recommendations about pets. Duer is capable of recognizing images more reliably than humans and better than both Microsoft and Google’s technology.
The test
Recognize images
If you send Duer a photo of a car, it can identify immediately that it’s a car in the photo and in most cases, it can tell you the brand, type and color of this car. If you send Duer an image of a human, it can tell you the age, sex of this person. If he/she is a famous, Duer can tell his/her name.
Search information
Duer can answer all your questions whose answers are available on Baidu.com. Like weather, NBA basketball scores, etc.
Order food, take a taxi and arrange travels
If you tell Duer you are hungry, it will recommend you restaurants nearby. You can also order food online, book your flight or take a taxi with Duer.
Have fun
You can play games in Duer or ask Duer to tell you some jokes (including funny images/GIF)
Our feedback
Artificial intelligence doesn’t only belong to tech giants in Silicon Valley! According to Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu (China’s version of Google), Duer is the first assistant designed to give recommendations and support customers’ online purchase. We can imagine that Duer can expand Baidu’s offering! Actually, Baidu Research Lab located in Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley) works on Deep Speech 2 which is today the world’s most advanced machine learning tool for Machine Translation and Voice Recognition. Baidu is building an ecosystem.
On the one hand, the Deep Speech 2 will be integrated into the platform of Peel’s Smart Home (still by Research Labs of Sunnyvale), it’s a real IoT platform. As Amazon Echo and Google home, Duer will be deployed in the house and in the car (Baidu works on autonomous vehicles).
So if today Baidu hasn’t yet announced its plans to sell the robot, we can easily imagine that Baidu will put shortly Duer robot in the house to deliver contextual services. The only Duer robot on the market right now is at a KFC store in Shanghai, where the Duer robot takes your orders!
On the other hand, Nuomi, a Group-Buying Service massively invested by Baidu (with 3.5 billion dollars) is an ambitious online-to-offline (O2O) strategy and with Duer, Baidu plans to conquer the retail market!
Imagine that all these services will be integrated one day in Duer and Duer will be your real life companion! Voice and Image recognition, Machine Learning will guarantee a contextual service! The first salvo of personal life assistant seems to come from China!
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