[February 01, 2012] China Firms Eyeing Voice Applications Tweet Feb 01, 2012 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) -- Voice application is expected to become a basic configuration of mobile phones in the Chinese mainland in the near future. A list of companies in the market cast eye on voice control and artificial intelligence after US consumer technology giant Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) unveiled Siri on iPhone 4S. For instance, UC Mobile Ltd., the nation's biggest mobile Internet browser provider based on installations, launched a voice-controlled browser not long ago. Despite that the browser's splash screen is the same with that of the 8.2 beta version, users will find a microphone sign at the input field on each webpage. And through voice, they will be allowed to control related functions such as search and input. According to people in the know, the browser has had high voice recognition degree. Tencent Holdings Ltd. (SEHK: 0700), operator of famed instant messaging tool QQ, also unveiled a similar mobile phone browser not long ago. Actually, there have been some Chinese-language voice applications such as Airi and Ciriis. However, as alternatives of Siri, they are laid far behind by the US application. For an example, Ciriis will answer that someone has asked me the question and the answer is both yes and no when asked whether it has a boyfriend. It will fail to give a direct answer when asked whether it is willing to become girlfriend of somebody. As for some difficult questions, it will fail to give a direct answer, too and instead, it may say that it is not in the mood and does not want to answer the question. Thus such homegrown voice applications are not thought highly by both industry observers and mobile phone users. iTiTa, developer of Airi, has realized this point and regards the product as a toy rather than an application. In line with some industry observers, Siri does not ask for so much and in addition to content, it will analyze through artificial intelligence in terms of human linguistic history in a bid to make a good understanding of users' intentions. Notably, it even understands semantics extended or unclear. However, instead of artificial intelligence, the alternatives are only voice control software. Both voice recognition technology and text to speech technology are adopted at front-end of the application, but the key lays at the background, in which technologies including webpage search, knowledge calculation, database, and ask & answer are adopted. Based on all those, Siri performs quite well. However, the alternatives still suffer a lot of shortages in the background. (USD 1 = CNY 6.31) Source: www.sina.com.cn (February 01, 2012) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]