WeChat AI fully opens up all levels of NLP capabilities! First appearance on the main forum of the open course

乾明 发自 未完城
量子位 报道 | 公众号 QbitAI

WeChat is not just WeChat, and WeChat AI is not just WeChat’s AI.

These are the latest developments revealed at WeChat Open Class Pro, WeChat’s most important official event every year.

This year, WeChat AI made its first appearance in the main forum of the open course, focusing on speech and language, and providing all-round NLP capabilities:

• The first is the release of the voice assistant Tencent Xiaowei 2.0;

• The second is to release the WeChat dialogue development platform;

• The third is to output basic NLP capabilities at all levels.

The key is "openness", exporting the capabilities of WeChat AI to the outside world and allowing more developers to participate in the WeChat AI ecosystem.

At last year's WeChat Open Class Pro, Zhang Xiaolong said that WeChat has invested a lot of energy in AI.

At the WeChat Open Class Pro, WeChat AI Chief Scientist Niu Cheng also further introduced the AI ​​in WeChat. For example, AI is present in daily functions such as voice-to-text, scanning, and translation.

What is WeChat AI like? What is it focusing on now? We can also get a glimpse of it from the "three axes" this time.

What are the three main features of WeChat AI?

The first one I would like to introduce is Tencent Xiaowei 2.0, which is an intelligent dialogue system and platform created by the WeChat AI team.

Known as a hardware open platform, it is positioned as a voice assistant. It can not only connect to high-quality content resources such as music, video and news within the Tencent system, but also connect to content and services in the WeChat ecosystem.

At the same time, it lays the research and development foundation for the subsequent overall solution of PC application management and penetration into the Internet of Things system through artificial intelligence voice.

Now, through the small micro program, VoIP and smart home control capabilities are integrated, and full-duplex and streaming natural language processing technologies are further added.

At the open class, WeChat also released a 10-inch smart speaker called WeChat Photo Frame X, and cooperated with HP to create the Xiaowei Assistant on Windows.

The second is the WeChat Dialogue Open Platform, which was released to the public on May 22, 2019.

With conversational interaction as the core, it provides a skill configuration platform with intelligent business services and user management capabilities for individuals, enterprises and organizations with customer service needs. Skill developers can use the platform's tools to independently build customer service robots.

You can access the intelligent conversation service through channels such as WeChat official accounts, mini-programs, and corporate websites, and get the question and answer assistant by checking the box.

At the same time, Niu Cheng introduced that this platform also provides customization and semantic generalization capabilities of intelligent question and answer, and provides mini-program plug-ins to integrate WeChat AI dialogue capabilities into mini-programs.

This capability has now been integrated into the in-car WeChat, and an intelligent answering assistant has been created.

It also adds support for intelligent dialogue for enterprise scenarios, providing task-based dialogue technology, so that enterprises can configure "robots" according to business logic.

The third is the NLP technology basic capability platform.

Niu Cheng said that this platform is mainly designed to meet the fine-grained semantic needs of developers, including text preprocessing, word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and other capabilities, to help developers better build their own applications.

At the open class, he also announced a major move by WeChat: fully opening up NLP capabilities at all levels, including vocabulary, sentences, and paragraphs.

Unveiling the WeChat AI Team

The one that came on stage this time was WeChat Zhiyan, which was officially called the “face” of WeChat AI.

Preparations began in December 2017 and it was officially launched during the WeChat Open Class in January 2019.

The current chief scientist is Niu Cheng, who graduated from Peking University in 1995. He worked at Microsoft for nearly 10 years and joined Tencent in December 2016.

WeChat Zhiyan mainly focuses on the research and application of technologies such as intelligent dialogue and natural language processing. Compared with Tencent AI Lab, it focuses more on the field of NLP, and has invested heavily in text classification, question and answer, dialogue, and semantic analysis.

In terms of capabilities, in addition to the above aspects, it also provides technical support for PaaS, industry cloud, AI Bot and other fields.

But this is not all of WeChat AI. If we go by “date of birth”, it is the “second child” of WeChat AI.

Before it, there was WeChat Zhiling, which was launched as early as 2013. Its main research direction was self-developed speech recognition technology based on deep learning theory. It processes more than 400 million voice messages every day with a recognition accuracy rate of 97%.

Whether it is WeChat Smart Speech or WeChat Smart Listening, WeChat does not want their capabilities to be limited to WeChat.

Before this, they had already provided technical support for more than 100 businesses inside and outside Tencent, including Honor of Kings and QQ Music.

This platform upgrade is also WeChat's further implementation of this path.

WeChat is still unfinished

This year marks the ninth anniversary of WeChat's official release. The number of monthly active users has exceeded 1.15 billion, but it is still Always Beta.

This is also the main theme of WeChat Open Class Pro every year.

As a national-level application, what else has WeChat not accomplished?

Let us first answer this question:

what's Wechat?

In the eyes of many people, it is no longer just a communication tool, but also a life tool.

But now WeChat is more of an ecosystem and an economic entity.

WeChat is moving beyond WeChat and into every aspect of our real lives.

What also confirms this trend is WeChat Mini Program’s action today: WeChat Mini Program Framework.

This is a set of operating environment that enables hardware terminals to run WeChat applets independently of the WeChat client.

Simply put, WeChat wants to build a WeChat Internet of Things centered around its 1 billion daily active users and the various services provided in mini-programs.

So, what do you think is left to be accomplished on WeChat?

One more thing

Zhang Xiaolong did not attend the WeChat Open Class Pro event.

At the beginning, the official released his recorded video.

After expressing his apologies for not being there, he also explained why he didn't arrive:

In fact, I deliberately didn't come to the site. I remember that in the first open class, I mentioned that attending various meetings might be a waste of time.

umm…

Do you know what is the most used emoticon package on WeChat in 2019?

It's all in the emojis...