Xiao Bing on the car How Chinese Express anchors the new era of automotive AI?

Writing? |? Fang Ruyi?

The hottest topic in Shanghai these days is none other than artificial intelligence.

On July 9, the Cloud Summit of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2020 (WAIC?2020) opened in Shanghai. The role and status of AI, the big boys boldly predicted. Baidu CEO Robin Li said, "AI is a technological wave comparable to the industrial revolution." Tencent CEO Ma Huateng said, "To achieve 'AI for good', we must strive to make AI 'knowable, controllable, usable and reliable', which is a topic that the whole world **** faces together. "

AI landing, the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, is still the most concerned topic of this year's conference.

Those companies that hold AI technology in their hands hope to integrate with various industries **** born; while the traditional industry has a forward-looking enterprise, is focusing on the introduction, play this advanced productivity. So, the automotive and even the larger mobility industry, after getting AI support, and in what way beyond people's expectations to transform the industry's mode of operation, and further practical changes in the lives of consumers?

A pair of the most technologically forward-looking smart car companies + the world's largest AI company combination, is giving the answer.

Left: Wang Yongdong? Right: Ding Lei

On July 10, at the Cloud Summit of the 2020 World Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ding Lei, Chairman of Chinese Express, and Wang Yongdong, Global Senior Vice President of Microsoft, announced that the two sides had reached a strategic cooperation, relying on Microsoft's Xiao-Ice AI technology,*** with the landing of the world's first proactive AI partner, HiPhiGo, on the Gaohe automobile.The two sides will start from the front-loading design stage of the intelligent car machine Start to provide overall solutions to provide users with a better transportation experience, and promote the development of the innovative integration of artificial intelligence and the transportation industry.

This is the first time that Microsoft has cooperated with an automobile company in the front-loading stage to mass-produce AI products. The strategic ****ing and complementary strengths of Chinese Express and Microsoft, as well as the plan **** to build a team of targeted solutions, will make HiPhiGo, with its distinctive wisdom. the birth of HiPHiGo also reflects that the mastery and use of AI is becoming a core indicator of the competitiveness of the future of automotive enterprises.

Why is Microsoft AI on Chinese Express?

Interestingly, AI+Auto is a fusion of new technology and old industry, and the cooperation between Chinese Express and Microsoft is also a pair of old and new matches. Microsoft AI for the first time on the car to choose a partner, not a hundred years of history of the General Motors, Ford, but just this year, the third anniversary of the establishment of the new startup Chinese Express?

In fact, after the automotive industry entered the era of Telematics, Microsoft and car companies have had a honeymoon period.

In 2008, Microsoft cooperated with Ford, based on its own PC operating system accumulation, for the latter to develop the in-vehicle entertainment information system SYNC +, leading a momentary trend, and after that, the car partners came in droves.

But then, for a variety of reasons, Microsoft's contact with car companies decreased.

After the arrival of the artificial intelligence era, Microsoft relies on powerful AI technology, and will again become the most high-quality partner for car companies. However, Microsoft hopes that its technology can be implemented into products that are usable by consumers, rather than an aerial pavilion that can only be viewed from afar, and therefore maintains a cautious attitude towards cooperation with car companies in applying AI technology.

Then from the Chinese side of the point of view of the Chinese Express, Gaohe brand can "first" Microsoft AI, the key is in the two sides of the product concept of the **** Ming - last year, the Chinese Express of the first production car Gaohe HiPhi?1 release! Amazing people, this amazing certainly comes from its sci-fi appearance design, but more importantly, its product concept to rebuild the human-vehicle relationship thinking. Chinese Express focuses on people-oriented, product design from the human needs, and Microsoft also believes that artificial intelligence should take into account the human factor, and advanced artificial intelligence should have the ability to emotion.

In HiPhi?1, the addition of more than a dozen intelligent human-machine interaction functions proves that Chinese Yuntong is committed to creating a warm, intelligent car that consumers can actually perceive, which coincides with Microsoft's product concept of letting artificial intelligence actually land.

At the same time, the cooperation between the two sides has strong complementary attributes.

On the one hand, Microsoft has comprehensive and leading AI core technologies in hand, covering computer speech, computer vision, natural language processing, search engines, and knowledge graphs in various fields.

For example, Microsoft in the field of speech synthesis (Text?to?speech), relying on deep neural networks, can synthesize spontaneous but emotional, comparable to the human voice, which can improve the mechanical sense of voice interaction in the past. The intelligent dialog robot Xiaobing developed by Microsoft using natural language processing, knowledge mapping, and other accumulated technologies is able to comfortably understand human intentions and conduct multiple rounds of dialog.

On the other side, it is Chinese Express relying on a team with a strong background in the automotive industry, in design, engineering development, automotive scene understanding, ? intelligent systems, etc. These know-hows play a crucial role in how AI technology can be properly utilized in automotive as well as travel scenarios.

Undoubtedly, this is a strategic cooperation of great significance to both Microsoft and Chinese Express.

Through Chinese Express, Microsoft is starting again in the era of artificial intelligence, and for the first time, it is landing its AI products in the automotive and travel industries, seizing the first opportunity to liberate productivity in the new round of technological revolution.

With the AI strength of Microsoft, one of the world's largest AI companies, the thinking and innovation of Chinese Express on smart cars can directly benefit ordinary consumers through HiPhiGo equipped with HiPhi?1 at the moment. Further, the three wisdom strategy of Chinese Yuntong will take the intelligent car as a direct entry point to realize the industrial landing faster and better.

AI is on the C-suite of the auto industry's war chest

The cooperation between Chinese Express and Microsoft based on the product level may be just the beginning.

It was revealed that Chinese Express and Microsoft hit it off right away for the integrated development of vehicle, road, and city, emotional AI, and other future technological development directions, and the teams of the two sides made several mutual visits and technical exchanges, and ultimately finalized a number of cooperation intentions and began to promote the project in 2019.

It is reported that the two sides are currently exploring the establishment of a joint intelligent computing lab to expand the cooperation of AI technology + automobile to larger industrial fields such as smart transportation, smart travel and even smart cities through the cutout of smart cars. This also makes a clear generational distinction between HiPhiGo and all the mainstream car-machine interaction systems and intelligent in-vehicle voice control systems that are currently common.

There's no doubt that the global trend of automotive companies joining hands with tech companies, and AI "merging" with automobiles and mobility, has been unstoppable.

Just in the past June, Volvo and Google's self-driving company Waymo reached the L4 level of automatic driving strategic cooperation; Volkswagen Ford's 2.6 billion U.S. dollars of investment in the self-driving company argo.ai formally accounted for; and Amazon spent 1 billion U.S. dollars to buy the self-driving startup zoox.

Domestic , autonomous brands and even joint venture brands are competing to cooperate with giants such as Baidu, Tencent and Ali, hoping to introduce the latter's capabilities in data, arithmetic and artificial intelligence,? Transform it into short-term product power and long-term corporate competitiveness. Even Byte Jump, which originally had no connection with the car, also saw the opportunity in it, and took the car network as an entry point to enter the automotive industry with determination.

Once in a while, the automotive industry has opened a future-oriented war game around AI. In essence, the automotive companies open to cooperation with technology companies, is the desire for artificial intelligence technology, is the pursuit of the most powerful productivity at the moment. Whoever occupies the technological high ground of artificial intelligence will be able to gain a core competitive advantage in the next race in the automotive industry and even the travel industry.

Already countless senior practitioners, investors and even executives of traditional car companies have said that data-driven AI technology will penetrate every key link in the automotive industry, becoming a new engine of change and a new productive force in the automotive industry.

From the point of view of the function of automotive products, on the one hand, from the passive acceptance of instructions to the evolution of the active provision of services to the real - artificial intelligence assistant, will change the car purely tool attributes, read the needs of the driver, will become the core of the intelligent automobile products; on the other hand, artificial intelligence technology will empower the future may change the business model of the automotive industry of the automotive driving, improve people's travel experience.

From the point of view of the production process of the car, the introduction of AI technology will make truly intelligent production possible. Through the precise management of orders and supply chains by AI technology, flexible production and on-demand production will become the standard for automotive smart factories. Automotive production will be able to further reduce costs and improve efficiency.

From the point of view of automobile sales and service, artificial intelligence based on big data will help automobile enterprises to realize accurate user insight and user capture. the participation of AI can not only lead to improve the efficiency of automobile transactions, but also through the learning of user needs, feed the front-end link of automobile enterprises' R & D, production, etc.

This is the first time in the history of the automobile industry, and the first time in the history of the automobile industry.

High Hopes HiPhi's first production car is now at the Continental test track in Germany

Chinese Express' HiPhiGo is precisely the latest and most advanced product of car companies actively adapting to the trend of AI and the flow of AI technology to the automotive industry. In the Gaohe HiPhi?1 production car, it will first work in the form of an intelligent partner with reasoning, the ability to actively perceive the user and help the user, and support multi-modal intelligent interaction with the synergy of the senses such as vision, hearing, and touch.

In fact, before HiPhiGo, there have been a number of AI assistants in the industry that claim to be able to actively provide services. However, although these are publicized as technical highlights, but these in the accurate understanding of the user's intentions, active service for the user have their own shortcomings, failed to get rid of the car "vase" or even "toy" positioning.

HiPhiGo, on the other hand, stands on the shoulders of giants - on the one hand, it introduces Microsoft's dead-end artificial intelligence technology, which is able to listen to and understand users, and can think in depth; on the other hand, the electronic and electrical architecture of HOA, which is characterized by high speed and openness, provides a solid foundation for the play of artificial intelligence technology. AI technology provides a solid foundation and broad space for the play of AI technology. This is like, Chinese Express and Microsoft together to build an intelligent brain for HiPhiGo, coordinating vision, hearing, touch and other multi-dimensional perception comprehensive judgment, naturally can achieve breakthroughs in the accuracy of understanding the user and the initiative to provide services, so as to set a new industry technology benchmark.

The deeper difference is that when Chinese Express and Microsoft defined HiPhiGo, they reserved an expandable extension for HiPhiGo from a more global level - HiPhiGo is not just an in-vehicle AI assistant that transforms passivity into initiative, but also a set of tools that open up the whole chain of travel scenarios, allowing users to take advantage of the new technology. The AI solution that connects the entire chain of scenarios and allows users to travel without worry.

In fact, Tesla, the head player of the smart car, has also repeatedly proposed to rely on artificial intelligence technology to read the user, providing no burden of self-driving travel, but until today there is still no production products. This also shows that such a set of solutions has high and comprehensive technical requirements. If Tesla is unable to solve the technical problems involved, then the mass-produced High Hopper HiPhi?1 will, with its active AI HiPhiGo, achieve a generational lead over Tesla in intelligent interaction alone.

The two parties, Chinese Express and Microsoft, have both invested high-specification resources in this cooperation, which may anchor their industry positions. In fact, before the official announcement of the cooperation, the two sides have fully communicated and conducted a lot of research and development, verification work, in order to clarify the form, function and even safety standards of the product, to make important arrangements and layouts.

And, the two sides of the cooperation level is not only the front of the product, but also involves the background of the data, computing. This also reflects the deep knowledge of both sides of artificial intelligence - the right data must necessarily correspond to the right scene.

In the field of artificial intelligence, there have been a number of cases where the combination of foreign technology and local scenarios has not been successful, due to the fact that the technology fed by the foreign data has encountered a lack of suitability in the local scenarios. In this regard, according to the relevant technical person in charge of Chinese Express, the cooperation with Microsoft, based on the Microsoft Asia Internet Engineering Institute in China, both sides are familiar with the Chinese scene, Chinese data and even achieve a high level of data **** enjoyment, so as to maximize the avoidance of this problem, which also provides the basis for further in-depth cooperation between the two sides.

Conclusion:

The strategic cooperation between Chinese Express and Microsoft reflects a new trend in the industry's evolution: the importance of AI technology in smart connected cars is comparable to the importance of the engine in fuel cars.

The development of AI requires car companies to comprehensively upgrade their thinking and capabilities - sensitivity to data and processing capabilities, a more open posture of cooperation, and attention to and support for AI from the underlying structure. Only with the above thinking, ability and execution of the car companies, in order to win the new round of smart car competition.

The appearance of HiPhiGo, because of the strong combination of powerful genes, highly intelligent active artificial intelligence, deep intervention in the driver's assistance functions, as well as, in the future, the level of openness of the bottom layer, so as to mark its role as a leader in the industry change.

This year, because of the outbreak of the epidemic, the market environment continues to deteriorate, there have been a number of new car-making forces one after another "mine", but has always been in their own rhythm of promoting the work of the Chinese Yuntong, undoubtedly the line of steady.

Right now, this low-key but not lacking in strength, the company is fully promoting the first model HiPhi?1 mass production, this time mounted on the first new car HiPhiGo debut, but also triggered a high degree of attention from both inside and outside the industry, quite like the trend of a surprise. At the end of this year, HiPhi?1 will be in small batch trial production, and next year, it will be delivered in large batch, and then, it will also be the time for it to prove itself.

From the naming of HiPhiGo, which will debut on HiHo HiPhi?1, we might as well have higher expectations for it - just as Tesla's AutoPilot, which draws a line in the sand with all the traditional automobile manufacturers, and Google's AlPhaGo marks the entry of artificial intelligence into a new era. Google's AlPhaGo signaled the entry of artificial intelligence into a new era, and the launch of HiPhiGo by Chinese Express in collaboration with Microsoft may also signal that the automotive industry will truly usher in a new era of artificial intelligence.

This article comes from the author of the automotive home car, does not represent the views of the automotive home position.