New | Baidu’s ‘small fish’ takes on Amazon Echo and Google Home
With 700 million internet users in China, the dominant Chinese search operator is banking on its Xiaoyu robot to give it home turf advantage.
Baidu, the operator of China’s dominant online search engine, has unveiled a voice-controlled home robot as the company ramps up its efforts to promote a Chinese version of Amazon Echo or Google Home to the country’s more than 700 million internet users.
Running on Baidu’s artificial intelligence assistant platform DuerOS, the robot – which answers to the name Xiaoyu (小魚), or small fish in English – is said to be able to help Chinese parents better take care of their children amid a busy work schedule.
“Home is an important field for Baidu to put artificial intelligence technology in people’s everyday life,” said Lu Qi, Baidu’s chief operating officer and a top level AI expert.
Compared with Amazon Echo or Google Home, which use speech recognition to control various home devices, Xiaoyu’s family interaction-centred feature is likely to have a bigger globalisation potential, said Lu, who joined Baidu earlier this year from Microsoft to steer the company’s transition from a mobile-focused to an AI-focused firm.
With video chat and streaming capabilities, the robot can be remotely controlled by parents to sing a song or teach English to their children, a feature that is designed to fit the demands of urban Chinese families.
Baidu, known as China’s Google, is entering a critical year after revenues grew at their slowest pace in 2016 due to tighter government regulations of online advertisements and fierce competition from local rivals such as Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.