Xiaomi’s new AI research team will bolster its voice assistant

pulse

April 5, 2018 3:17 PM

Chinese technology giant Xiaomi has assembled a 500 person AI research team based in Shanghai to enhance the company's voice assistant, Xiao AI.

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Chinese technology giant Xiaomi has assembled a 500 person AI research team based in Shanghai to enhance the company's voice assistant, Xiao AI, reports

partner with Microsoft to embed the US software giant's Cortana voice assistant into its own hardware.

The AI research team will enable Xiaomi to fend off competing smart speaker vendors in the Chinese market, something it was unable to do by relying on Microsoft for its voice assistant. The Chinese smart speaker market is slowly but surely growing more crowded, as e-commerce titan Alibaba released the Tmall Genie X1 speaker late last year and sold a whopping 1 million devices in the first four months it was available.

Meanwhile, search giant Baidu unveiled three new smart speakers earlier this year at CES, and Apple could eventually seek to sell its HomePod speaker in the country, considering its already sizeable presence selling iPhones there. Global market leaders Amazon and Google are blocked out of China, but Xiaomi will still have to contend with an increasingly busy space, given the ambitions of these other players. This new AI research team should help it make continual improvements to Xiao AI, enabling it to better stand out as the market intensifies.

Moreover, Xiao AI and the AI research team will help Xiaomi to ensure its connected devices work in tandem with each other, which will be particularly important once it entersthe US market.study

reportedly

pulse