By Tang Guhan
Technologies have tremendously changed our lives, apart from the traditional touch screens, will machine-human communication become more and more popular in the future?
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, believed that it would be technology and innovation which would bring them profitability and increased market shares in the future.
The Alibaba DAMO Academy, named after a martial art series in ancient Chinese fictions, was established in October last year dedicating itself to research in cutting-edge technologies of natural language processing (NLP), Human-Computer Interaction Techniques, quantum computing, and chips among others.
Human-Computer Interaction was one of the most favoured core areas of the DAMO Academy.
Yan Zhijie, a Human-Machine Interaction scientist from the DAMO Academy, noted that the internet contents would be individualized in the future and everyone would have varied demands which would require more convenient machines and computers.
He said the interaction between human and machines would be as natural as that between human and human.
"We believe the communications between human and machine will be mostly via voice and movement in the future, and Alibaba is now working in that direction," Yan told the China Fortune Media Group under the Xinhua News Agency.
Yan added conversations between human and machine are one of the most natural ways of communication, and no lesson is needed for users especially children and elders.
Alibaba aims at building infrastructures for the Internet of Things (IoT) connecting 10 billion machines within the next five years. Moreover, vocal communication is one of the most significant components.
To make conversations available everywhere, Alibaba has made every effort to expand their related hardware.
It rolled out the smart sound box and AI voice interaction TV last year. Meanwhile, Alibaba partnered with SAIC Motor to produce intelligent vehicles that can replace the role of apps through oral communications.
It will be normal to see conversations between machine and human in public areas, according to the DAMO Academy. However, the researchers have met challenges when developing such mechanisms in noisy circumstances.
Smart machines developed by the DAMO Academy could position the location of speakers and focus its attention on the acoustic source automatically while diminishing noise levels. For instance, Alibaba's ticket selling machine located in Shanghai subway station could map the routes once customers convey their destinations.
The same applications have also been utilized in retail stores such as coffee shops. Alibaba's related selling machine has proved successful. It can order 34 cups of coffee within 50 seconds. The same quantity of coffee needs 2 minutes and 37 seconds manually. According to Alibaba, the machine possessed strong comprehension capabilities even under complicated and fast vocal speed commands from customers.
Yan emphasized that the goal of his department is to make communication between human and machine possible in any place in the country. Citizens could have more than one device they could speak to via IoT connections.
