Jing Xun, Chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Product Committee, announced at Baidu Create 2017 that Baidu would fully acquire KITT.AI, bringing its voice and natural language processing capabilities to the Baidu platform and allowing Baidu 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, co-founder and CTO of KITT.AI, demonstrated the company’s voice wake-up technology. After entering the Snowboy’s wake word lexicon, the developer can define their own new wake words. Training can be completed with just three voice samples of the wake-up words. After the test is over, the device will automatically remember the wake-up words.