Much has been made of its development considering that one of the driving forces behind its machine learning technology is world-renowned expert in the field, Andrew Ng, who joined the company back in 2014.
“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.
The largest search engine in China might be on to something here.
Duer smoothly processed Li’s voice request, recommended him a restaurant, and helped make the reservation. “In the mobile internet era, we could also empower any kind of app with Duer”, noted Li in another Tencent report published on Tuesday.
Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) last released its quarterly earnings data on Monday, July 27th.
“We want everyone to have a personal assistant”, he said. It is also aware of ongoing special offers and promotions in real time. Basically the idea is similar to the other voice assistant features. It provides Chinese-language Internet search services to enable users to find relevant information online, including Web pages, news, images, documents and multimedia files, through links provided on its Websites. Instead of searching Google for a restaurant that is within a certain budget, Duer can do that in just a sentence.
In the future, Duer might be able to do more things such as hailing a cab, searching for housekeepers, find appropriate doctors and nearby clinics, purchase plane tickets and more. On average, equities research analysts forecast that Baidu will post $33.31 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.
Duer is billed as a means for online-to-offline merchants already using Baidu’s platforms, such as maps or group-buying tool Nuomi, to generate business as the assistant will direct users to their services and allow them to understand customer needs.
Perhaps hoping to steal some of the sparkle from events over in San Francisco, Chinese tech firm Baidu – widely regarded as China’s answer to Google – has unveiled a new virtual helper to take on the likes of Siri, Cortana and Google Now.