Alibaba has a voice assistant better than Google’s

[cromwellian]

So, wait, this conclusion was reached because of a single pre-recorded demo call, compared I guess, to Google I/O's prerecorded demo calls?

If it's servicing millions of live requests and is in production, why couldn't they review the live system?

The story's title kind of seems clickbaity because of this IMHO.

[sAbakumoff]

I just hate that this web-site demands to exit incognito mode or log in in order to read the article.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

I hate it, too. In any case, if the incognito mode can be detected, it's a bug in the browser. Way to go, Google.

[saagarjha]

Works for me in Safari. What browser are you using?

[sgt101]

It's "servicing millions of customer requests a day" or some part of "50,000" (later in the article)?

The example doesn't seem compelling to me, it's not rearranged the delivery, it's not solving any substantial problem in the co-dialog. What does this prove?

[yorwba]

It's possible that it's actually serving millions of requests, if most requests happen outside of customer service calls or if they count each individual utterance in a dialog as a separate request (it probably is a separate request to the backend).

On the other hand, maybe someone wrote a description in Chinese that said "several tens of thousands" and someone else had it machine-translated into English. The problem being that "tens of thousands" can also be a symbolic "big number" (like "myriads") and modern English tends to use "millions" as that symbolic number instead.

The existence of symbolic numbers is a common source of translation mistakes. For example, I recently came across a Japanese text [45] where Google Translate will turn 一三 into 13 or a thousand, depending on whether you include 「quotation marks」 or not

[45] Footnote 45 of https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001850/files/57353_57270.html

https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...

[syntaxing]

I always wondered what the implications are for the "lack of privacy" in China, for the better or the worse. What I mean by this is something like WeChat. A lot of Americans do not understand the sheer size of data it collects. WeChat (by Tencent) is pretty much a conglomerate of all the top services we use here in the states (Google, Paypal, Facebook, Stripe, Venmo, Whatsapp, etc). Now imagine when the Chinese government starts dictating the development of AI through this data. I am not sure if there is another country that can collect and distribute data at this scale since there is not much public remorse for such actions.

[ausjke]

This is why China will beat any other countries including US on AI and ML hands-down, it has no privacy law and people don't care that much either so it collects such a huge volume of data for training and mining.

[DeonPenny]

Wouldn't that be why it wouldn't. It can't export their models because they require to much information. In places like europe it would be a nightmare to use any of it. So in China it would be ok, but outside it's hard to implement.

[londons_explore]

So which phone number can I call to try this out?

[withhighprod]

Considering many Alibaba’s P8+ comes from FLAANG and the whole company works like hell (9-9-6) to deliver, this is not surprising. Serving millions requests is laughable at Alibaba scale and might indicate this is not widely used yet.

[baybal2]

And, what so???? I can't understand the reason for such fascination.

[danso]

Because Google is popularly assumed in the West to be more technologically advanced.

[timonoko]

Not all languages are created equal. Chinese has very few sibilant consonants. It all about vowels with varying pitch. English is just hopeless. I myself for example just cannot use Google in English, because of 50% error rate.

[zachguo]

Isn't phonetics already a solved problem in ASR? The hard part is NLU, including semantics and pragmatics, which this article mainly talks about.

[yorwba]

Mandarin Chinese has more sibilants than English, so I don't know what you're talking about. The English sibilants are s, z, ts, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ. The Mandarin sibilants are s, ts, tsʰ, ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ, ʂ, ʈʂ, ʈʂʰ.