Jing Xun, chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Product Committee, announced at Baidu Create 2017 that Baidu will wholly acquire KITT.AI to apply its speech and natural language processing capabilities to the Baidu platform, which will enable Baidu’s partners to use the service completely free of charge.
KITT.AI provides conversation understanding services. It is a Seattle-based company focusing on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology and NLU-enabled interfaces. KITT.AI is the only company in the world to have received investments from the Amazon Alexa Fund and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen. KITT.AI’s technology researchers have applied it to chatbots and developed a “verbal Hotword Detection” feature.
At the Baidu Create 2017, GuoGuo Chen, the co-founder and CTO of KITT.AI, demonstrated the usage of KITT.AI’s verbal wake technology. After entering the Snowboy’s wake word lexicon, the developer can define their own new wake words. Only three voice samples of the wake word can finish the training. After the test is over, the device will automatically memorize the wake word.
