Tag Archives: Baidu
Baidu unveils vehicle manufacturing partners, declares Apollo the ‘Android of the autonomous driving industry’
As expected, Baidu today announced partners for its Project Apollo autonomous driving platform. The most important names listed were the vehicle manufacturers: Chery, FAW Group, Changan Automobile, Daimler, Ford, and Great Wall Motors. Qi Lu, Baidu’s group president and COO, made the announcement in Beijing at the company’s AI developer conference Baidu Create.
Baidu first unveiled its Silicon Valley arm dedicated to self-driving cars in April 2016. A year later, the company snatched up a U.S. computer vision firm and launched Project Apollo, promising to start testing self-driving cars on urban roads by 2018, followed by highways and open city roads by 2020. Today, the company’s timeline shifted to “fully autonomous driving on urban roads and highways by the end of 2020,” underlining the complexity of the task at hand.
Baidu today shared that “more than 50 partners” have joined the Apollo autonomous driving project — we counted a total of 53 on the project’s website. A company spokesperson explained that while a few existing partners were already working with Baidu on a strategic level, they are now specifically joining the Apollo program.
In addition to the vehicle manufacturers, Baidu emphasized tier 1 suppliers (Bosch, Continental Automotive, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, and Desay SV Automotive), key components providers (Nvidia, Microsoft Cloud, ZTE, Velodyne, and TomTom) startups (AutonomouStuff and Horizon Robotics), and ridesharing companies (UCAR and Grab Taxi). The alliance also includes five top universities and six local governments, but only the following were listed: Wuhu in Anhui Province, Baoding in Hebei Province, Yizhuang in Beijing, Chongqing Liangjiang New Area, and Shanghai International Automobile City.
“Apollo is an important milestone for the automotive industry,” Lu said at the conference. “It is in essence the ‘Android’ of the autonomous driving industry, but more open and more powerful. Apollo is not solely Baidu’s. It belongs to everyone in the ecosystem. And as we and our partners contribute to the platform in our areas of specialty, we all gain more, with the results far greater than just our own.”
Apollo is supposed to support all major features and functions of an autonomous vehicle via cloud services, an open software stack, reference hardware, and vehicle platforms. Open source code portions can be modified, open capability components are accessible through an API that can be replaced with proprietary implementations, and simulation services backed by autonomous driving scene data are also available. The hope is that developers will not have to duplicate code and that the project will be able to iterate faster.
In this vein, U.S.-based autonomous system components supplier AutonomouStuff showed off an example at Baidu Create. Two cars apparently converted into autonomous vehicles “in just three days” using Apollo’s first released 1.0 version completed circuits around a short track near the conference venue.
After Dumping Its Mobile Business, Baidu Needs To Innovate Again
What does Baidu’s sale of its mobile business portend for its ability to integrate businesses?
At the end of March 2017, the Chinese search engine company told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it sold its mobile gaming business. Two companies took over Baidu’s gaming business for CNY1.2 billion. Baidu has also renamed its gaming business to “Duokoo Game” and separated it for independent operation.
In July 2013, Baidu announced the full acquisition of 91 Wireless for USD1.9 billion, which was reportedly the largest acquisition in Chinese Internet history at that time. 91 Wireless is mainly engaged in mobile Internet application distribution and its core assets include 91 Mobile Assistant, Android app store, 91 mobile open platform, PandaReader, and a mobile gaming portal.
After acquiring 91 Wireless, Baidu’s mobile business did not see much improvement. In 2014, Baidu integrated its Duokoo mobile game business with 91 Wireless game business to formally establish a Baidu-branded mobile game division.
Baidu has taken heat in the past year for not being nimble enough on its investments and acquisitions. It has been outpaced by rivals Tencent and Alibaba in gaining footholds in nascent sectors like artificial intelligence, and only recently has named new executives to run a revamped investment strategy for the company.
Ultimately, Baidu’s future rests in how it has developed in a vacuum in the past. Because of protectionist policies, Baidu has not had competition, especially from foreign rivals like Google. And without competition, its services have not had to be the best. For example its search engine routinely does not deliver highly relevant results. And because its services have not had to be the best, its staff perhaps have not been trained to exceed expectations.
For Baidu to continue to do well in new sectors like AI, it should revamp its internal structure and “be hungry” in order to reach new heights.
Baidu Map Inks Deals With Northern European Tourism Bureaus
Baidu Map has reached strategic cooperation deals with the tourism bureaus of the four Northern European countries: Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.
Baidu Map’s representative told local Chinese media they would jointly begin operational activities by exchanging data and sharing promotional resources to improve the travel experience of Chinese tourists to promote the sustainable development of the tourism industry of the four Northern European countries.
Baidu Map has already reached similar strategic cooperation with Thailand and South Korea. At the same time, they announced plans to launch services in 106 countries in Africa, Europe, and Asia by the end of this month, as they aim to cover 209 countries and regions around the world and 99% of the world’s population.
In April 2016, Baidu Map officially announced the launch of its international strategy. At that time, they announced plans to cover over 150 countries around the world and they expected that 50% of its users would be from the overseas market by 2020.
New Cloud Deal For Baidu Connects With Agora.io
Baidu Cloud, the big data side of Chinese search engine Baidu.com, has signed a deal with Agora.io, a real-time communications provider delivering video and voice communications.
No terms of the deal have been released by either party, but local media report that Baidu Cloud will have access to the audio and video communications and interactive live broadcast products of Agora.io.
Agora.io was founded in 2014 by Tony Zhao, former CTO and board director at YY.com. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has a research and development center in Shanghai. It mainly focuses on providing developers with stable real-time audio and video communications and interactive live broadcast technology services. With a simple integrated SDK, developers can add high-quality audio and video communications and multiple-host interactive live broadcast functions to apps.
At present, Agora.io claims to have nearly 100 data centers around the world and its Software Defined Real-time Network optimizes worldwide real-time transmission. So far, the company has claimed accumulated real-time communications service volume of five billion.
Baidu officially launches TalkType voice keyboard for Android
Baidu Research, a division of Chinese web search company Baidu, is announcing today the launch of TalkType, a third-party keyboard app for Android devices that’s optimized for voice input.
The app first appeared in the Google Play Store in the U.S. a few months ago. Since then, the team behind the app has added features like support for swiping on the keyboard (in addition to just pecking), restaurants from Yelp, and the ability to send animated GIFs from Giphy. The app’s virtual microphone also listens for a longer period of time before automatically shutting off.
In line with the results of a study Baidu conducted recently with Stanford, Baidu says TalkType enters text three times faster than people can enter it with conventional smartphone keyboard typing.
“I think it’s tragic so many people spend so much time on cell phones but we’re just now figuring out a good user interface,” Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told VentureBeat in an interview.
THe app can recognize and transcribe speech well — in some cases, better than Apple’s and Google’s dictation systems, in my unscientific testing — thanks to deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that involves training artificial neural nets on lots of data, like speech snippets, and then getting them to make predictions about new data. Ng is one of the world’s foremost figures in deep learning; in 2011 he founded the Google Brain, a Google research initiative that’s still active today. But since joining Baidu in 2014, he has, among other tasks, been hard at work improving that company’s speech recognition system, which is known as Deep Speech.
And the design of the TalkType keyboard showcases the power of the Deep Speech under the covers. It’s not like Baidu added a little microphone button onto an existing virtual keyboard.
“This [the big microphone button that you push to start dictation] is the default, rather than a keyboard is the default, and you can find your way to voice,” Ng said, adding that Baidu’s web search system now receives three times more voice queries than it did in January 2015.
Baidu is thinking about launching a version of the keyboard for iOS, Ng said.
Baidu quietly launches TalkType, an Android keyboard with fast speech input
Baidu, the Chinese search giant, has quietly released an early preview of TalkType, a virtual keyboard for Android devices that lets you use your voice as your main input method. All you have to do is hit the microphone icon in the middle of the keyboard and start talking, and Baidu will quickly and fairly accurately dictate what you’re saying.
Think of it as a speech-first alternative to the Google Keyboard. Like the Google Keyboard, in TalkType you can peck with your fingers to type out what you want to say, or select emojis to get your message across. When you’re in voice input mode, you can move your finger across the gray area to highlight words that you might want to correct.
Unfortunately TalkType does not let you swipe with your finger across the keys on the regular virtual keyboard. And the virtual microphone stops taking dictation when you take a long enough pause. But for some users these shortcomings will be acceptable.
Baidu offers other mobile apps, including the group-buying ecommerce app Nuomi, but not all of them are available in English. This one is. It comes specifically from Baidu Research, which operates the Silicon Valley A.I. Lab in Sunnyvale, California, among other facilities.
Mobile keyboards have been an area of active development lately for Apple (enhanced QuickType in the standard-issue keyboard for iOS 10), Google (Gboard for iOS), and Microsoft (SwiftKey acquisition, Word Flow for iOS). On Android there has not been quite as many new releases from major companies, perhaps because third-party keyboards have long been supported and because the stock Google Keyboard is not so bad.
To try TalkType for yourself, download it from the Google Play Store, enable the keyboard in the Language & input section of Settings, hit OK when it asks you if you’re OK with the keyboard collecting all the text you type, make the keyboard your default input method, and give the app the permissions you see fit.
You can adjust preferences like whether there’s a double space after each period and whether your device vibrates or makes a sound every time you press a key. You can also choose to have the keyboard show you correction suggestions, suggest names from your contacts, and make better recommendations over time by analyzing your input data.
Baidu was founded in 2000 by Internet pioneer Robin Li, creator of visionary search technology Hyperlink Analysis, with the mission of providing the best way for people to find what they’r… All Baidu news »
Track Baidu’s Landscape to stay on top of the industry. Access the entire ecosystem, track innovation & deals. Learn more.Baidu will soon let users review individual food dishes, not just restaurants
Baidu, the equivalent of Google in China, will roll out an update to its group-buying ecommerce app, Nuomi, later this year. This will significantly change the way people review food — in addition to accepting and posting users’ reviews of restaurants, the app will start asking for people’s impressions of individual dishes.
Instead of having users simply snap photos and type in a few words later — and maybe upload photos — the app will also let people use voice dictation to quickly jot down their thoughts about the dishes they photograph. That way, users can receive more useful information about the specific foods they can order from restaurants.
Not that the app isn’t already intelligent: It’s collected so many food photos that when you upload a new dish, it identifies the dish and the restaurant. The company has data from hundreds of thousands of restaurants.
“I would say 90 percent of the dishes I think we are very well able to recognize,” Yuanqing Lin, director of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning in Beijing, told VentureBeat in an interview this week at Baidu’s Silicon Valley A.I. Lab in Sunnyvale, California.
But the dish-level information could distinguish the app even more from other online-to-offline (O2O) services with which people can order car washes, laundry services, personal chefs, food delivery, and even massages on demand.
Baidu, which has more than 260 million monthly active users across its services, doesn’t have legions of people looking at photos to figure out what’s what in the photos added to the restaurant part of Nuomi, and there aren’t people in call centers who will be asking people what they think of the food they eat. The company is doing these things with deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, such as photos of food, and then getting them to make inferences about new data.
Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter have all invested in deep learning, as well, and have released new features of their apps that take advantage of the technology. For instance, the Smart Reply feature of Google’s Inbox email app suggests one-line responses to incoming emails, and the Facebook app now offers machine-generated photo captions for the News Feed through the screen reader on iOS to help blind users understand what their Facebook friends are sharing.
Baidu uses deep learning for speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing for many of its applications. One example is the DuLight app that’s designed to help the blind. Based on what’s in front of the camera on a mobile device, the app can estimate the age and gender of a person, tell you the denomination of a piece of currency, turn printed text into speech that a blind person can listen to, and recognize objects.
The underlying A.I. systems get smarter as they sop up more data. So encouraging users to adopt a new behavior — talking into your phone at the table — might seem like something researchers thought up in a lab purely as a means to make their software smarter. But it’s more than that, because dish-level reviews in Nuomi (literally translated as “sticky rice” in Mandarin) could actually be useful to end users.
Over time, the app could become so smart about food that it will be able to tell users the best place to get a certain dish.
“I’m visiting the Bay Area,” Lin said. “If I open the app [looking for a] ranking of which restaurant in the area cooks the best Kung Pao chicken right now, there’s no such thing. So it could be extremely powerful for food recommendation.”
The idea is that the new version of Nuomi — which Baidu first acquired in 2014 from Renren — will catch people’s attention by virtue of its food knowledge and thereby get people to share more information. For example, if it sees a user uploading five photos, it could tell the user that it knows that the first dish is Kung Pao chicken, the second dish is sauteed eggplant, and so on. From there, the app will direct the user to push a photo in order to talk to the app and record their observations about the dish. The app will dutifully transcribe the user’s words and turn that into the text of the dish review.
Baidu will talk more about Nuomi’s dish-reviewing capability at its Baidu World conference coming up later this year, Lin said.
Baidu was founded in 2000 by Internet pioneer Robin Li, creator of visionary search technology Hyperlink Analysis, with the mission of providing the best way for people to find what they’r… All Baidu news »
Track Baidu’s Landscape to stay on top of the industry. Access the entire ecosystem, track innovation & deals. Learn more.China's Baidu Misses Expectations As Net Profit Crashes 18.9%
Chinese search engine company Baidu published its unaudited financial report for the first quarter ended March 31, 2016, stating that its total operating revenue reached CNY15.821 billion, which was about USD2.454 billion and a year-on-year increase of 24.3%. But its net profit decreased by 18.9% year-on-year to CNY1.987 billion, which was about USD308.1 million.
Based on the average expectations of Wall Street analysts and calculated by GAAP, Baidu’s expected earnings per share was CNY5.96. The financial report showed that Baidu’s earnings per share was CNY5.38 during the first quarter of 2016, which failed to meet the expectations. Meanwhile, based on the average expectations of Wall Street analysts, Baidu’s expected operating revenue was CNY15.83 billion. The financial report showed that Baidu’s operating revenue was CNY15.821 billion during the reporting period, which basically met the expectation.
According to the company’s report, in March 2016, Baidu’s mobile search business had 663 million monthly active users, an increase of 9% compared with the same period of last year; its mobile map business had 321 million monthly active users, an increase of 19% compared with the same period of last year.
From January to March 2016, Baidu’s gross merchandise volume was CNY16 billion, which was about USD2.5 billion and a year-on-year increase of 268%. By the end of March 2016, Baidu Wallet had 65 million active accounts, representing a year-on-year increase of 152%.
In addition, Baidu announced a personnel change to its board. William Decker, former member of the board and chairman of audit committee, left the board due to retirement and replaced by Brent Callinicos. Callinicos once worked for Uber as CFO and became independent director of Baidu in October 2015.
Global Users Will Soon Trust Baidu Maps Around The World
Chinese search engine Baidu.com, which censors its nuanced and oft-irrelevant search results, is now hoping its global maps will be accepted by netizens beyond the Middle Kingdom.
Baidu’s Internet map division announced its international strategy in Beijing, and the company stated that they will complete global coverage by the end of 2016. Their overseas users will then account for 50% of their user group by 2020. At present, Baidu Map claims 500 million users in China and it boasts over a 70% market share.
Baidu revealed that the company started international exploration from 2014. In November 2014, Baidu Map launched services in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Before the 2016 Chinese New Year, it launched services in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Singapore.
On March 31, 2016, the company further expanded map services into 11 countries in Asia Pacific, including Malaysia, Maldives, Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, Australia, and New Zealand. So far, Baidu’s international map services are available in 18 countries and regions and will cover 150 countries and regions by the end of 2016.
According to statements made to local media by Li Dongmin, general manager of Baidu’s map business unit, the international strategy of Baidu Map will be divided into three stages. For the first stage, Baidu Map will target China’s 100 million outbound tourists and realize coverage of 150 countries and regions by the end of 2016. For the second stage, they will select the right target markets to launch map services in local languages to improve their influence in local markets.
And for the third stage, Baidu Map will establish a global brand and 50% of their users will be from overseas markets by 2020. At that time, global users can then decide if they can trust themselves to bid adieu to Google Maps and embrace Baidu.
Baidu Wallet Expands Forex Payment Services Outside China
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Chinese fintech companies are spreading globally, with Baidu Wallet the latest service to make offerings outside of mainland China. The …
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