JOURNALIST'S HELPER
As Liu addressed the audience, two big screens on each side of the stage were transferring his speech into text through a product called Iflyrec.
For journalists present this seemed like a long-overdue innovation, but Liu said it had posed many difficulties.
He raised the example of the smart home. If you want to control the electric appliances by voice, AI must recognize your voice by suppressing noise in the house. When you are talking with the television on, the robot must cancel the sound of the TV. If you want the air conditioner to hear you from 5 meters away, the AI must "grasp" far-field speech recognition that enables it to pick up the sound from a certain distance and from all directions.
"Another difficulty lies in discourse understanding, which includes smoothing out the text, adding punctuation, erasing irrelevant content and understanding informal language," he says.
As the words flowed on the screens, five stenographers competed with the machine in shorthand. After assessing a random extract of 1,000 words, the robot won with an accuracy rate of 99.29 percent, compared to 80.84 percent for the best stenographer.
"With this technology, captions can be generated automatically on film," Liu says.
Asked if robots might replace human reporters, Hu Yu, vice president of iFLYTEK, replies, "Rest easy - robots excel in computation and, of course, they are better compilers of data. But they cannot create stories."
In the foreseeable future, Hu says, AI will help with simple brainwork. As for sophisticated brainwork, "we will maintain exclusive ownership."
THINKING MACHINE
"A father cannot lift his son because 'he' is too heavy." Can a robot tell who is "he" ?
"This question is very easy for humans, but too hard for a robot," Hu says. To answer requires the machine to be able to comprehend the sentence.
iFLYTEK initiated its "Hyper Brain Project" last year, with the aim of developing AI cognitive intelligence. "This cognitive revolution revolves, on the surface, around NLU, but by nature, it's cognition of the whole world, the universe and human society," Hu says.
"A cognitive intelligence system is developed on the basis of perceptive intelligence," Hu says. "When you see the face of a cat, the concept of cat soon forms in your brain. You begin to think of its mew and how its fur feels."
iFLYTEK has developed neural machines for collecting perceptions, such as visual and audio information. When they have enough information, it will be gathered by a Neural Thinking Machine for reasoning and making conclusions, so that we can make better decisions. The result of the decision will be expressed via a Neural Expressing Machine, forming a closed loop that contains all of a human's intelligence.
"We don't have to copy the brain," Hu says. "Our job is to find the true principles and secrets of brain."
Such developments inevitably raise the prospect of a Terminator-style rebellion of the machines.
Hu says advances in AI will lead away from such fictions. "The more we learn from our brain, the better we can divide intelligence from self-consciousness, namely our emotions, good and evil. In the future, robots will be able to harness more intelligence, but not self-consciousness."
