
Alibaba has a voice assistant better than Google’s - palad1n
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612511/alibaba-already-has-a-voice-assistant-way-better-than-googles/
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cromwellian
So, wait, this conclusion was reached because of a single pre-recorded demo
call, compared I guess, to Google I/O's prerecorded demo calls?

If it's servicing millions of live requests and is in production, why couldn't
they review the live system?

The story's title kind of seems clickbaity because of this IMHO.

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sAbakumoff
I just hate that this web-site demands to exit incognito mode or log in in
order to read the article.

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dvfjsdhgfv
I hate it, too. In any case, if the incognito mode can be detected, it's a bug
in the browser. Way to go, Google.

~~~
StudentStuff
Slightly surprising that Google Chrome is bringing up the back of the pack
when it comes to incognito mode, Firefox and Safari can both view this site
without the popup complaining about using incognito mode.

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bad_user
Not defending Chrome, but if websites are willingly blocking users carrying
about their privacy, then maybe you shouldn't read those websites.

Paying with your wallet or your eyeballs works. Most of the time reading such
articles is a time waste anyway.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
One doesn't exclude the other. I'm going to let the website owner know, but at
the same time I'd expect the browser vendors to take greater care about
protecting the private mode.

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sgt101
It's "servicing millions of customer requests a day" or some part of "50,000"
(later in the article)?

The example doesn't seem compelling to me, it's not rearranged the delivery,
it's not solving any substantial problem in the co-dialog. What does this
prove?

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yorwba
It's possible that it's actually serving millions of requests, if most
requests happen outside of customer service calls or if they count each
individual utterance in a dialog as a separate request (it probably _is_ a
separate request to the backend).

On the other hand, maybe someone wrote a description in Chinese that said
"several tens of thousands" and someone else had it machine-translated into
English. The problem being that "tens of thousands" can also be a symbolic
"big number" (like "myriads") and modern English tends to use "millions" as
that symbolic number instead.

The existence of symbolic numbers is a common source of translation mistakes.
For example, I recently came across a Japanese text [45] where Google
Translate will turn 一三 into 13 or a thousand, depending on whether you include
「quotation marks」 or not

[45] Footnote 45 of
[https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001850/files/57353_57270.html](https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001850/files/57353_57270.html)

[https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=%E3%80%8C%E5%BD%BC%E7%AD%89%E3%81%AF%E4%B8%80%E4%B8%89%E4%BA%BA%E3%81%AE%E7%8E%8B%E3%81%A7%E3%81%82%E3%82%8B%E3%80%82%E2%80%95%E2%80%95%E5%90%8D%E3%81%AF%E7%A7%98%E3%81%99%E3%81%8C%E3%80%81%E7%9C%9F%E3%81%AB%E7%8E%8B%E3%81%A7%E3%81%82%E3%82%8B%E3%80%81%E7%8E%8B%E4%BB%A5%E4%B8%8A%E3%81%A7%E3%81%95%E3%81%88%E3%81%82%E3%82%8B%E2%80%95%E2%80%95%E5%88%A4%E6%96%AD%E3%81%97%E5%AE%9F%E8%A1%8C%E3%81%99%E3%82%8B%E3%80%82%E5%BD%BC%E7%AD%89%E3%81%AF%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E3%81%AE%E4%B8%8A%E3%82%92%E9%AB%98%E3%81%8F%E9%A3%9B%E3%81%B6%E7%BF%BC%E3%82%92%E6%8C%81%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A6%E3%81%84%E3%81%A6%E3%80%81%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E3%81%AE%E5%BA%95%E6%B7%B1%E3%81%8F%E6%BD%9C%E3%82%8B%E3%81%93%E3%81%A8%E3%81%95%E3%81%88%E5%87%BA%E6%9D%A5%E3%82%8B%E3%80%82%E3%81%9D%E3%81%97%E3%81%A6%E5%BD%BC%E7%AD%89%E3%81%AF%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E3%81%AE%E4%B8%AD%E3%81%AB%E3%81%82%E3%82%8B%E5%A0%B4%E6%89%80%E3%82%92%E5%8D%A0%E3%82%81%E3%82%8B%E3%81%93%E3%81%A8%E3%82%92%E8%BB%BD%E8%94%91%E3%81%99%E3%82%8B%E3%80%82%E4%BD%95%E6%95%85%E3%81%AA%E3%82%89%E3%80%81%E5%BD%BC%E7%AD%89%E3%81%AF%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E3%82%92%E4%B8%8A%E5%9B%9E%E3%82%8B%E7%84%A1%E9%99%90%E3%81%AE%E5%8A%9B%E3%82%92%E4%B8%8E%E3%81%88%E3%82%89%E3%82%8C%E3%81%A6%E3%81%84%E3%82%8B%E3%81%8B%E3%82%89%E3%81%A0%E3%80%8D)

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syntaxing
I always wondered what the implications are for the "lack of privacy" in
China, for the better or the worse. What I mean by this is something like
WeChat. A lot of Americans do not understand the sheer size of data it
collects. WeChat (by Tencent) is pretty much a conglomerate of all the top
services we use here in the states (Google, Paypal, Facebook, Stripe, Venmo,
Whatsapp, etc). Now imagine when the Chinese government starts dictating the
development of AI through this data. I am not sure if there is another country
that can collect and distribute data at this scale since there is not much
public remorse for such actions.

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ausjke
This is why China will beat any other countries including US on AI and ML
hands-down, it has no privacy law and people don't care that much either so it
collects such a huge volume of data for training and mining.

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DeonPenny
Wouldn't that be why it wouldn't. It can't export their models because they
require to much information. In places like europe it would be a nightmare to
use any of it. So in China it would be ok, but outside it's hard to implement.

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londons_explore
So which phone number can I call to try this out?

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withhighprod
Considering many Alibaba’s P8+ comes from FLAANG and the whole company works
like hell (9-9-6) to deliver, this is not surprising. Serving millions
requests is laughable at Alibaba scale and might indicate this is not widely
used yet.

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baybal2
And, what so???? I can't understand the reason for such fascination.

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danso
Because Google is popularly assumed in the West to be more technologically
advanced.

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timonoko
Not all languages are created equal. Chinese has very few sibilant consonants.
It all about vowels with varying pitch. English is just hopeless. I myself for
example just cannot use Google in English, because of 50% error rate.

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zachguo
Isn't phonetics already a solved problem in ASR? The hard part is NLU,
including semantics and pragmatics, which this article mainly talks about.

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StudentStuff
Some languages are significantly easier to train against than English, for
example 80hrs of Turkish got some decent results for this group using Mozilla
Deepspeech:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.00868.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.00868.pdf)

For context, Baidu used a bit over 5000 hours of English to get a decent
model.

Also, OP may have a pronunciation difference (regional, hyper-local or just
from learning English as a second language) that isn't handled well by
Google's models.

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conistonwater
I suspect deep learning researchers have no real incentive to use the minimum
amount of data sufficient to get their thing working. The worst case for them
is if their model underperforms because of insufficient data instead of
something truly DL-related, so they use as much data as they have/can handle.
It could still be that you're right, but I wouldn't rely on those kinds of
published numbers.

