Exclusive interview with Li Xuechao, Vice President of Tencent Intelligent Platform Products: Education B2B is the trend, AI is the core

At the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference in May this year, Tencent CSIG President Tang Daosheng officially announced the launch of the "Tencent Education" brand. With a clear strategic direction and the integration of 20 education products from 6 BGs, Tencent has finally begun to accelerate its education business.

Tang Daosheng once introduced that the integrated Tencent Education, relying on technologies such as AI and big data, provides connection, teaching and management services to individuals, schools and educational institutions. To sum it up in one sentence, it is "to serve as an assistant for the intelligent upgrade of the education industry."

Recently, at the 2019 TESOL China Conference in Hangzhou, Li Xuechao, vice president of Tencent Intelligent Platform Products, was interviewed by Leifeng.com and other media. He used Tencent English as an example to explain how to use AI to create an English teaching product based on the general direction of Tencent Education.

Tencent initially developed the English-language product after it discovered users' demand for oral practice through another product, Tencent Translator.

According to Li Xuechao, the number of users of the AI-based Translator has grown rapidly. When analyzing the users, they found that many users, including primary and secondary school students and college students, have many additional demands when using Translator, such as using it to practice spoken pronunciation. Some parents also do the same.

After some sorting out, they found that there were still big pain points in oral practice that needed to be met. After having product insights and user needs, the reforms of the college entrance examinations in various places gradually added oral English to the exams. The signal released by the policy changes made the team feel that there was an opportunity to make a product like English Jun.

"Then our team combined our previous experience in educational products with our AI technology reserves, including speech recognition, oral assessment, image recognition and other technologies, and worked with other internal AI laboratories to come up with the product, English Jun."

Tencent English was officially launched at the end of last year, and it has been more than half a year since then, with a team size of nearly 100 people. However, in public, we rarely see any publicity about this product.

"We want to polish our products. We will only present them when we feel that we have mastered all aspects of technology and have received good feedback. We previously conducted grayscale experiments on To C products, and now we are working on To B education products, and we mainly obtain user feedback through benchmark schools and benchmark districts. "

Li Xuechao said that after the launch of English Jun, it has been in the testing and polishing stage, and there has been little systematic explanation of the product to the outside world before.

In recent years, the application of AI in speech recognition and assessment has become more mature. When Tencent was developing voice assistant and translator, it had already applied AI to speech translation and simultaneous interpretation. Now it has migrated AI to English for oral assessment and intelligent review.

During the interview, Li Xuechao repeatedly emphasized the application of AI technology in educational scenarios, and English Jun was also defined as a set of AI teaching solutions.

Nowadays, as the college entrance examination and the high school entrance examination gradually emphasize the importance of oral English, on the one hand, the scarcity of excellent teachers is an indisputable reality. On the other hand, in traditional English teaching, due to limited time and energy, it is often difficult for teachers to diagnose the oral pronunciation of each student in the class one-on-one and provide targeted guidance. At the same time, oral homework cannot be processed as quickly as text homework, and it also takes up a lot of teachers' time, which invisibly adds a lot of teaching burden to teachers.

Before class, students can preview oral pronunciation in advance. When reading a word or sentence to English, AI can make a personalized diagnosis of the student's pronunciation and point out the problem. After pointing out the problem, students need to continue to practice, and after practice, they need to see how the improvement effect is. Then students need to find someone to practice oral dialogue, so they added a human-computer dialogue function to help students practice dialogue.

In this case, some families may find a foreign teacher to help their children practice speaking, but only a few families have such conditions. For families in third- and fourth-tier cities, practicing speaking through human-computer dialogue may be a better choice. Similarly, parents can also use AI to guide their children to practice speaking at home and check their children's progress in real time.

After class, the teacher assigns homework on the teacher's side, and then uses AI to correct the homework. The teacher can also see a statistical analysis report on the entire class's learning situation, which helps the teacher adjust and improve teaching methods and plans.

At the same time, in order to obtain feedback on the needs of teachers in benchmark districts and schools, English Jun’s product, technical and other personnel have joined the teacher and parent groups to understand their feelings after use.

But they later discovered that after the product and technology came out, as an educational product mainly used by teachers and students in schools, it was far from enough to simply do some technical and supply-related work. They also needed a deep understanding of the educational scenario. Therefore, they invited some experts and scholars in the field of education to participate in the polishing of the product.

These are some of the experiences they summarized during the research and development of English Jun. From a broader perspective, this is also a practical problem that Tencent will inevitably encounter in the process of upgrading from consumer Internet to industrial Internet: how to better understand the industry and solve the complex scenario requirements on the B-side.

However, there are many similar AI English teaching products on the market, which are also mainly used in schools and provide diversified services to teachers, students and parents. In this regard, Li Xuechao said that as long as these needs in the educational scenario can be discovered and AI and other technical capabilities can be used to solve these problems, and it is in line with the overall strategic direction of Tencent Education, they will try to do it. On the contrary, when making product decisions, they will not pay special attention to how the competing products are doing.

Tencent Education is positioned as a digital assistant for the intelligent upgrade of the education industry. Based on this, they also proposed a concept of "digital English teacher" for English Jun. This concept is essentially the same as the AI ​​teaching assistant/teacher that is currently attracting much attention, and the core lies in AI.

However, concepts such as digital teachers and AI teachers are closely related to the degree of integration of AI and education. Obviously, AI is now playing a more assistant role.

Li Xuechao believes that in recent years, AI has made rapid progress in the fields of speech and NLP, and its application in translation has made great progress. On the one hand, AI technology is constantly developing, and on the other hand, the integration of AI and education is still in its early stages.

"AI and education are like two parallel development spaces. The value chain of the education industry is relatively long. We are still exploring how to find a link in the industry to use AI to improve efficiency or reduce costs, so that these two parallel things can have more intersections, and AI can penetrate into every link to generate gains in the value chain. "

AI needs data to train, because AI has not penetrated deeply into the education industry, so more big data on education needs to be accumulated. He believes that there are two good entry points for AI+education in subject education, especially English, one is translation, and the other is human-computer dialogue. It mainly focuses on pre-class exercises, after-class tutoring and evaluation, and can be gradually penetrated into exams, simulations, and daily tutoring. Step by step, students and parents will choose AI.

The industry has begun to lay out the B-end education market. Not only Tencent Education has realized the value of AI and ToB, but education giant New Oriental has also begun to shift to B-end education since the end of last year, while continuously investing in and upgrading its AI capabilities.

"This is indeed a big trend. Whether it is guided by policies or practitioners follow up, if it is a trend, everyone will pursue it. But each company will have different strategies and differentiations when catching up and capturing trends. Tencent Education's advantages lie in C to B, connectivity, and Tencent's capabilities in cloud and AI. "

Li Xuechao emphasized that Tencent's main strategy for education is to establish more partners based on its positioning as an industry digital assistant and adopt an ecological and open strategy to jointly promote the industry. In order to better connect with users, he revealed that the mini program version of English Jun will be launched soon.

It has been online for half a year, and Tencent has not set any limits on the development of English Jun. The team currently only needs to consider how to provide value to users and how to gain more recognition and acceptance from users and partners through the evolution of products, technology and content.

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