from the great-for-ordering-those-takeaways dept.
Chinese search engine giant Baidu announced on Tuesday [Ed: Javascript required] the launch of a new digital assistant that will be integrated into its latest mobile search app and use artificial intelligence to tailor suggestions to a user's tastes.
Similar to Google Now or Apple's Siri, Baidu Duer processes voice requests to connect users with services such as food delivery or film ticket sales.
"In the past, only the privileged few – those in very senior positions in companies or other organisations – had personal assistants," said Baidu chairman and founder Robin Li Yanhong.
"With Duer, every ordinary person can now have a powerful personal assistant who can provide valuable life services – for free," he added at the company's 10th annual Baidu World conference in Beijing.
It's an article of faith that more competition produces better products and services.
Related Stories
Baidu overtakes Google in global smart speaker market
Chinese search giant Baidu is now the world's second biggest vendor of smart speakers, according to a new report from Canalys. The research firm says Baidu overtook Google to capture 17.3 percent of the global market with 4.5 million shipments in the second quarter of 2019, representing staggering year-on-year growth of 3,700 percent. Amazon remains the overall leader with more than 25 percent share of the market and 6.6 million shipments.
Baidu's AI speakers run on an AI platform called DuerOS. The company initially targeted the high end of the market with the Teenage Engineering-designed Raven H speaker, but that product apparently sold poorly. More recently, Baidu has pushed sales of much less expensive models, with the basic Xiaodu speaker selling for as low as 89 yuan (~$12). Baidu overtook previous domestic leader Alibaba in the first quarter of this year in China, according to Canalys.
But the company has faced some trouble lately:
Baidu has lost over $60 billion in value since its peak — now earnings are expected to fall further
TikTok's Parent Pushes Into Search Business in Threat to Baidu
Baidu is facing an unlikely challenger in China's search market — TikTok owner ByteDance
Baidu: 'China's Google' Is Not Done Yet
Related: Baidu Launches 'AI-powered Digital Assistant' Duer to Take On Google Now, Siri
Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market
Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device
Baidu, "China's Google", Shows First Loss
Google Will Give 100,000 Home Minis to People With Paralysis
China's leading internet search engine Baidu's stock price tumbled after its first quarter earnings year over year dropped 80% leading to its first quarterly loss since inception. Baidu posted a net loss of 327 million renminbi ($49 million), contrasted against 6.7 billion RMB profit a year earlier. Revenue increased 15% year over year.
Baidu stated that strong demand for ads in the education, retail, and business services markets failed to offset "less vibrant" demand from the healthcare, online gaming, and financial sectors. Baidu also stopped disclosing its growth in active online customers, and Hailong Xiang, the senior VP of its search unit, abruptly resigned.
Meanwhile, TAC (traffic acquisition costs) rose 41% annually and accounted for 13% of its total revenue and 18% of its marketing revenue. Those percentages were in line with previous quarters, and indicates that Baidu isn't spending too much money to lock in advertisers.
For comparison, Google and Sogou (one of several competitors in the Chinese market) spent 2-4x as much on TAC as a percentage of revenue.
Instead, Baidu is heavily investing in various Google-alike alternative technologies including smart speakers in
its virtual assistant DuerOS, its short video app Haokan, its autonomous driving platform Apollo, Mini Programs for the Baidu App, cloud services, and other ecosystem expansion efforts.
Baidu competes against Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance in the Chinese market. Bytedance also suffered some from the slowdown in the past year. Alibaba and Tencent which also compete with Baidu in the online advertising and streaming video spaces, both posted significant gains.
The search giant has promoted Dou Shen, previously over its mobile products, to senior vice president to replace Xiang, and interestingly, has also rebranded its search business as its mobile business.
Whether these adjustments and investments will pay off in the long run remains to be seen.
Some previous Baidu related Articles
Baidu Entering The Driverless Car Race
Baidu's Web Browser Eliminates Privacy
Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like Device
Baidu Launches 'AI-powered Digital Assistant' Duer to Take On Google Now, Siri
Computer Scientists are Astir After Baidu Team is Barred From A.I. Competition
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @07:55AM
Duer do me long time?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:06AM
It's all about "how to retire" while you're still working: it gives the specific example of bank tellers busting their asses while some guy in the back office passes the time by picking his ear.
Executricks says "You want to be that guy right?"
WUT
Helpfully, Executricks points out that the purpose of your cell phone is to delegate tasks to your assistant.
I expect it will be good for a few laughs.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:19AM
And report back to the authorities if the user's taste doesn't match the party-approved options?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @05:50AM
Probably. "Do no evil" Google normalized automated spying via microphone. Now, I'm shocked that totalitarian states will use that to spy on people via their "features"
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:19PM
hahahahaha
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:52PM
I used to joke that as people kept "outsourcing" annoying tasks to other people (system administration -> cloud, local applications -> cloud, plumbing -> plumber, non-Apple -> Apple "just works") that you may as well outsource the annoying task of living life to someone else while you're at it.
Well, that day is getting closer and closer.
Here's a somewhat related quote to go along with it:
I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:
universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....
and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.
Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the Nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and had ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political opinions.
Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users (including myself, on certain days) wouldn't want to bother learning to use all of those arcane commands, and struggling with all of the failures; a few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. After we'd spent a while pounding out command lines and hitting that ENTER key and spawning dull, failed universes, we would start to long for an OS that would go all the way to the opposite extreme: an OS that had the power to do everything--to live our life for us. In this OS, all of the possible decisions we could ever want to make would have been anticipated by clever programmers, and condensed into a series of dialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons we could choose from among mutually exclusive choices (HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL). Columns of check boxes would enable us to select the things that we wanted in our life (GET MARRIED/WRITE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL) and for more complicated options we could fill in little text boxes (NUMBER OF DAUGHTERS: NUMBER OF SONS:).
Even this user interface would begin to look awfully complicated after a while, with so many choices, and so many hidden interactions between choices. It could become damn near unmanageable--the blinking twelve problem all over again. The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.
What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.