Baidu, , China's leading search engine, is making available Chinese language APIs for its four key speech technologies: Long Utterance Speech Recognition, Far-Field Speech Recognition, Expressive Speech Synthesis and Wake Word.
Baidu said its intent is to provide developers with access to its AI-based technologies. Baidu has also released API for facial recognition, optical character recognition, natural language processing and others. In September, the company also open sourced its deep learning framework PaddlePaddle, an easy-to-use platform allowing developers to apply deep learning to their products and services.
"We are at the dawn of the AI era. By opening our AI technologies, we will make it easier for everyone to create AI-enabled applications," says Andrew Ng, chief scientist of Baidu.
In just three years, the daily requests for speech recognition grew from 5 million in 2013 to 140 million this year, and the number of daily requests for speech synthesis stands today at 200 million. In the meantime, the number of developers using Baidu's speech system has also grown from 10,000 in 2014 to 140,000 this year.
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