2021 is the first year of the "14th Five-Year Plan". The outline of the "14th Five-Year Plan" points out that we should give full play to the advantages of massive data and rich application scenarios, promote the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy, empower the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, give birth to new industries, new formats and new models, and expand the new engine of economic development. A few days ago, the 2021 annual meeting of Boao Forum for Asia also set up a number of sub-forums on "artificial intelligence" and "digital economy". To this end, the reporter interviewed Liu Renlei, senior vice president of Netease Youdao, to discuss topics such as the integration of digital technology and real economy and the future picture of artificial intelligence era.
The following is an interview record.
Reporter:Please talk about how enterprises can use technology to empower themselves after entering the AI era.
Liu Renlei:Netease has a saying that it started as a search company, and has reserved many technical abilities and talents for many years. After entering the AI era, the team constantly empowers artificial intelligence for various products. At present, Netease’s well-known AI layout is mainly in three aspects: speech recognition and synthesis technology, OCR technology (optical character recognition) and translation technology that we are best at.
In the AI era, we have to interact with machines, and the essence of interaction is a process of input and output.At present, the common input methods are voice and photos, so the recognition of voice and images is a threshold to enter the AI era.Later, these technologies have become the underlying technologies, supporting a series of AI products to provide services to users.
In terms of translation, products such as Youdao Dictionary and Youdao Translator are all applying translation technology. At present, compared with the previous generation of technology, our translation technology has been upgraded in a very large span, which can be compared to the professional level 8.
Reporter:Many enterprises actually provide both software and hardware. Please tell us about the domestic market of intelligent software and intelligent hardware.
Liu Renlei:Let’s start with intelligent hardware. The first intelligent hardware that everyone came into contact with was the mobile phone. As a very universal device, it was constantly optimized for certain scenarios.Now that mobile phones can solve many problems, other intelligent hardware must solve the problems that mobile phones can’t solve in order to have a broader market.For example, for the translation function, the mobile phone needs to call out the APP and perform several operations to realize this function, but the translator can use it when it is picked up-in this way, in a certain scene, the translator shows its advantages. For another example, it takes a long input and search process to look up words on mobile phones, but the dictionary pen can get the results by tapping and scanning. The difference of a few seconds is actually a qualitative leap for users. With a good sense of experience, users will pay the bill to create an industry explosion.
Of course, there are many more segments in the intelligent hardware market now. There is a way to do it earlier in the field of online education, and we will have some new product layouts in the future.
In terms of software, AI software actually developed earlier than AI hardware. For example, cloud computing technology, mobile phones and other intelligent hardware computing power continues to improve, and then began to apply cloud computing technology.With the continuous improvement and upgrade of AI software, it will gradually be combined with hardware, which will be perceived and used by users.
Reporter:As a senior market expert, please talk in detail about how artificial intelligence products improve and adapt to the market from the perspective of marketing.
Liu Renlei:Give two examples. One is the star voice function of a dictionary. We invite stars to cooperate and realize word reading through synthetic voice technology. This is actually not what users just need, but it enhances users’ goodwill towards products and attracts young users. After the launch of this function last year, the proportion of K12 users among the new users of the product has been significantly improved.
Another case is a dictionary pen. The users of dictionary pens are students at school. Although mobile phones can also fulfill the functions of dictionary pens, considering that parents are worried about children playing with mobile phones, mobile phones can’t be brought to school, and they need to be connected to the Internet when they are used, we have refined the product design of dictionary pens in view of these blind spots in the use of mobile phones, and finally got a good response in the education market.
Reporter:What core competitiveness do you think artificial intelligence products need? Can you give a few key words?
Liu Renlei:I thinkThe most important thing is "user needs". We don’t do technology for technology’s sake, but in essence we want to improve the user experience, so we must deeply understand the user needs.
The second is "data", which is actually a big advantage of China enterprises. Our users are large, and on the premise of protecting users’ privacy, we use the big data accumulated in daily operations as the corpus and materials for machine learning, so as to continuously optimize the artificial intelligence system. The position of Youdao Translation in the online education industry also benefits from our deep accumulation in the education field in the past 10 years.
Finally, it falls back to technology itself, and it depends on technology to satisfy users.
Netease has a way of positioning itself as an intelligent learning company, and our vision is to let everyone learn more efficiently. At present, the business is mainly divided into four parts: first, online course products, such as Youdao excellent course, Youdao cloud classroom, and a series of quality education courses for children; The second is APP, such as a dictionary and a translator; The third is intelligent hardware. Netease is an online education company with an earlier and larger scale in China. Finally, the artificial intelligence business, which exports its own AI products or technologies to partners, is called Youdao Zhiyun.
Reporter:Just mentioned the partners, among which there should be many small and medium-sized enterprises. What do you think of the development of small and medium-sized enterprises in the field of artificial intelligence?
Liu Renlei:For Internet companies,The most important cost is people, and our greatest wealth is people, and talents come first.But not any small and medium-sized enterprise can get things done by looking for one or two people.
On the other hand, I think artificial intelligence is actually a kind of infrastructure. Training a system has to bear various expenses such as machine computing power and electricity charges. It has a certain threshold. It really needs some capable companies to do research, but there are also many application-level products for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Small and medium-sized enterprises can use the open AI platform to do their own specific training. For example, if an enterprise can provide a corpus of proper nouns in the vertical domain, we can provide a targeted translation system for the enterprise, and this customized service is also the general trend of artificial intelligence products and services in the future.
Enterprises can train their own artificial skills, and so can individuals. Parents train the equipment into their own voice, and then accompany their children through this set of equipment to realize a humanized service. In the future, there will be more such scenes.
Reporter:Now it is the spring recruitment season. As one of the leaders of the enterprise, what qualities do you expect job seekers in the direction of artificial intelligence to have?
Liu Renlei:First of all, technology is of course the first. Recruit a algorithm engineer, algorithm ability is the foundation. But when Internet companies promote artificial intelligence, they need our colleagues to have a deeper understanding of users, or,If a technician has a certain product thinking and user thinking, his potential will be very great, which will greatly promote the whole business.
In fact, many companies will call the AI team a research institute, but our team leader, the chief scientist, said that he didn’t want to call it that, because we know very well that these artificial intelligence products will eventually land and truly solve the needs of users, instead of just emphasizing exploring the frontier of technology or doing basic research-this is also the biggest difference between enterprises and universities.
Reporter:In the field of artificial intelligence, how do enterprises generally cooperate with universities and research institutions?
Liu Renlei:There are many directions of cooperation between our enterprises, universities and research institutions, and two examples are also given. One is that we cooperated with the Institute of Software of Chinese Academy of Sciences to launch a children’s programming product-Youdao Little Turing, which is a cooperation at the product level; The other is that we provide a donation to the Mathematical Science Center in Qiu Chengtong, Tsinghua, to support the country’s basic research in mathematics and other fields. In short, we have been promoting cooperation with universities and research institutes in terms of talents, products and technology.
Reporter:2021 is the first year of the "14 th Five-Year Plan". To what extent do you think the artificial intelligence market will develop in five years? How will artificial intelligence be integrated into life?
Liu Renlei:In fact, as you can see, the integration trend of artificial intelligence and life is very obvious. For example, in the field of education, students can take smart pens to answer questions in special workbooks, and record, identify and correct them quickly; Another example is smart home, where a hub can control all the appliances in the home; There are also intelligent driving, face recognition, etc. These intelligent applications that have already appeared in life will become more and more popular in the future.So I think, just as the Internet transforms all traditional industries, artificial intelligence will transform all aspects of our lives.
Our next generation, in fact, they are now more accustomed to interacting with machines than we are, and artificial intelligence may become a part of their lives, which in turn will help more and more artificial intelligence products serve the public.
Produced by: Guangming Net Economic Editorial Department
Producer: Zhao Gang
Coordinator: Tao Yuan
Editing & Production: Li Wenjian
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