(Original title: Interview with Hu Yu, Executive President of HKUST: Regarding the selection of hardware partners and cutting off the pseudo-demand AI product line, I would like to talk a few points)
Recently, the list of the top 50 smartest companies in the world selected by the MIT Technology Review was released. In this year's list, many well-known global companies such as Nvidia, Amazon, Intel, IBM, Apple, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are on the list. HKUST News ranked first on the list for the sixth time in the world, ranking first in the list of Chinese companies in the same period.
On the second day, HKUST launched a new conference on smart hardware in Shenzhen. The new MORFEI microphones, two wheat DSP chip noise reduction solutions and optical microphones were officially unveiled at the venue.
After the meeting, in the reporter's interview session, Hu Yu spoke of his views on the trend of opening up voice interaction programs for multiple AI companies in the market, selecting standards for hardware manufacturers' partners, and coordinating the experiences and feelings of the artificial intelligence product line.
Q: From the Dean of the Graduate School of Science and Technology to the President of BG, who is now coordinating the entire consumer-grade product line, what kind of personal transformation did you personally experience under such a large span?
Hu Yu: In this process, the transition is actually quite large. The most important point is that the way of thinking is changed. We can't think about problems from the technical point of view alone as we have in the past, but we must consider more from the perspectives of business models and commercial ecology.
In addition, during the period, I also had a new understanding of the nature of technology: Now I not only have to consider how advanced the technology, but also from the macro point of view to consider what the technology we focused on can bring to customers , can bring to the end user what kind of experience. This is the biggest difference in the transformation of responsibilities.
The second aspect is that the level and scope of the coordination need to be different. When I used to do technology, my consideration of the strategy was mainly about what technical resources I wanted to integrate. However, since I was responsible for the consumer product line, how was the entire strategy set? What kind of business model and product? The work on these levels and coverage is completely different from the past.
The third is that the time for running customers and business trips has obviously increased a lot. Things at all levels must be coordinated.
Q: Based on your experience in managing the To C product line, what AI products and features are genuine and pseudo-demand in this process?
Hu Yu: First of all, real needs must be used to satisfy the user's just-needed behavior. Although Echo is now selling very well, after investigation, it was discovered that the tools that we really use more are just setting reminders, checking the weather, and so on. Amazon's push for Echo voice shopping has not been done before. Why? When users use the form of voice interaction to buy things, they will find that all the links and scenes are very troublesome. They are not as convenient as directly operating on the screen.
Why I have been stressing the reasons for visual interactions and visual presentations recently, because when you are faced with no visual presentation, you do not have enough information. It is very difficult to complete some complicated operations at this time. Therefore, some functions and scenes were created by us on our own. We did not find that the user's thinking and behaviors were actually designed as products when it was actually put into practical use.
What is the real demand? It is necessary to be able to ground gas, to know the end-user needs, especially the functions and products that can meet the needs of the current post-80s and post-90s. Grasping these people's habits of using consumer-level AI products is now relatively lacking in our information technology and even the entire industry.
So at this point I used the following method:
Why is X-Flight now working with many developers because developers come from various industries and different people understand different products. Their scenes and their business are very broad. Some of the things developed by developers, although the coverage of the audience may not be very large, but actually found after use is actually just needed. By working with developers, we can see which features and requirements are really useful.
Third-party developers themselves are a large group. From another perspective, they can understand that they are just like your colleagues in helping you think about requirements, thinking about scenarios, and wanting to land. A company's ability is limited, especially for To B-type companies it is difficult to go deep into understanding the diverse masses, and developers can actually touch the user, contact the product, and thus put forward some valuable things.
Q: What pseudo-demand features have you cut off in your existing products?
Hu Yu: In fact, the case of pseudo-needs in the audio and video assistant is still quite numerous. We have tried to buy tickets by using voice, but we find it unacceptable because the purchase of tickets not only involves the booking process, but also inquiries. After a series of events such as the situation and historical records hit the wall, we subsequently decided not to do this function.
Q: Last week, Tencent announced the "small micro" voice solution. It is said that Baidu will also perform a major upgrade to DuerOS next month. Under such a big environment, the strategic priority of the company in the second half of the year is to increase efforts to polish technologies and products, or to expand the scope of business cooperation, and talk about some large hardware manufacturers?
Hu Yu: My main idea is to polish technology and products.
Its implementation has a lot of open platform for voice interaction in the market, but the key point is whether you have let developers and end users feel more than the threshold experience. Take this conference as an example. Although new technologies and new products are very cool during the live demonstrations, many of our technologies are really good in the industry, but they really need to be easy to operate. I think it's still There are some gaps.
So I always think that first of all, I have to polish the product and polish the experience. There are still many things to do in Information Flight.
Second, we are looking for suitable partners. Not every partner has the patience to acquaint you with a little bit of grinding products, grinding techniques, and grinding experience. Newsflash needs to find some partners who can stand up to the temperament and use our technology best.
The partners are not sophisticated but not much, but not how big they are, but they are able to cooperate with each other. Only by selecting partners can we find out the product ideas and routes, ultimately providing consumers with the best experience, and at the same time develop more partners in this way. Then, according to feedback from users and partners, we will backfeed and optimize our technology.
Q: When you cooperate with important hardware manufacturers, what factors do you mainly value each other? Recently, DuerOS and HTC have cooperated strategically. Have you seen any competitors and big companies cooperate? Do you have any strategic and operational measures?
Hu Yu: We signed a strategic cooperation with Huawei in 2014 to apply voice interaction technology to Huawei handsets. According to our many years of cooperation experience, the voice interactive system broke out in different products and it was divided into different time periods.
It's not that you've made a very cutting-edge project. It can be done by working with a well-known manufacturer. The application of voice interaction system in mobile phone products cannot be ranked at the front stage at this stage.
According to our observations, the current priorities are televisions, set-top boxes and refrigerators, mobile phones, robots, and finally VR. The focus of cooperation with hardware vendors should be product type axis rather than vendor size axis.
In recent years, HKUST has also signed strategic cooperation agreements with many large companies. However, specific promotion efforts should be based on the Timing of the other party's product attributes and AI, and concentrate on promoting the most likely breakthrough product line. If you have observations, you will find that we recently cooperated with operators in the cooperation of set-top boxes. Because now is the best time to combine this type of product with AI.
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