Baidu Launches An AI Powered Assistant Called DuerOS

The Chinese web services company, Baidu has recently introduced its own AI powered virtual assistant and voice interaction system that offers services similar to Amazon’s Alexa. DuerOS is a dialogue-based AI powered system that will work as an assistant on a myriad of devices. The best thing about DuerOS is, ‘it’s an AI based operating system that will work in cars, cell phones, tablets and home accessories.’ DuerOS combines various technical capabilities like image recognition, voice recognition and natural language processing to give you the most apt virtual assistant you could possibly have.

Although it may seem to be much similar to the other virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now, the distinction comes in terms of added features. You can not only give voice commands to this Baidu’s assistant but it will also understand hand gestures and face expressions which the other assistants can’t. On top of that, it enjoys several technical advantages.

Baidu may not be as popular as other search engines like Google and Bing but in China, the latter has a huge market as it serves as the default search engine due to unavailability of Google. This makes Baidu the most widely used search engine in the country which is used by over 1 billion Chinese every single day. This aids the company in obtaining a massive amount of data which is further used to devise and power the smart AI and Machine Learning algorithms. Needless to say, these algorithms have been used to develop what we call as DuerOS. So from this fact, we can extrapolate that this so called virtual assistant must be knowing much about the human behavior and user preferences despite being new.

Also read 4 Revolutionary Aspects of Artificial Intelligence.

The Emerging Trends of AI Assistants

To tell you the truth, the virtual assistants of the future won’t just be limited to a few of your smart devices. In fact, they will reside on the cloud and will follow you wherever you go by means of a gamut of smart devices carried by you. Remember Jarvis from the Marvel’s famous comic franchise? You got that right. The one that follows Tony Stark wherever he goes and follows his commands while using its own intellect at the same time. As exciting as it sounds, we may have this kind of virtual assistants in the near future as the researchers and AI experts are now working on this and many other stupefying aspects of this state-of-the-art technology.

Not only that, the future assistants will also be able to know your mood through your face expressions. They will understand all sorts of hand gestures and face expressions. Besides, they will also have the ability to read your lips and know your thoughts even before say or do anything. These are just a few of the many potential features of the next generation of AI assistants. If we have a look at the future prospects of the Artificial Intelligence, it’s hard to tell where we might land up tomorrow. The field is so vast that it can take us way beyond our imagination.