The sports world and the AI ​​world are intertwined in a wonderful way: a classic hand-in-hand hat trick

Anyone who has been paying attention to the sports industry recently will have discovered that the sports world and the AI ​​world are having a wonderful intersection.

On August 5, local time in Spain, the signing ceremony between iFlytek's consumer product iFlytek Translator and the Royal Spanish Football Club and Wu Lei was officially held in Barcelona. Since then, Wu Lei has officially become the first brand spokesperson for iFlytek Translator, and iFlytek Translator has become the official translation partner of the Royal Spanish Football Club.

In people's general impression, sports stars mostly endorse sports brands. This time, Wu Lei and iFlytek Translator joined hands. One is a well-known Chinese face in international football matches, and the other is a classic product launched by a leading Chinese AI company. Why did the dimensional wall between the two suddenly break?

From a player's trip to a foreign country,
why do we need a translation machine?

The first thing we need to understand is that when many people have never used a translation machine, they often wonder - there are a lot of translation software on mobile phones, why do we still need a translation machine?

In fact, for sports practitioners like Wu Lei who are in a foreign country, the difficulties they face are exactly matched with the functions of translation machine products. Let's imagine what language difficulties a player will encounter when he embarks on a trip to a foreign country?

Typically, when we travel overseas, we quickly discover that the popularity of major languages ​​is far less than we thought. For example, in Spain, where the official language is Spanish, there are many immigrants who speak minor languages. Even if they can speak the official language, it is often difficult to understand them due to their accents, especially for football players, who work in an international environment.

If you want to communicate smoothly with the locals at this time, it is obviously far from enough to rely on the few official languages ​​​​on the mobile phone software.

In addition, when we think of communicating with others, what subconsciously comes to mind are usually travel terms such as greetings and ordering food. In fact, for people like Wu Lei who live and work in foreign countries, they face a lot of industry terms every day. For example, the word Sweeper means cleaner or sweeping robot in daily language, but in the football industry it is explained as "free central defender".

Not to mention translation software, even human translators may not be able to successfully complete the task when faced with different fields.

Of course, there is also the most common network problem. In many places overseas, the Internet signal is far less than that in China. When the network situation does not support the cloud data request of the translation software, the translation software that relies on the Internet obviously cannot work. This is especially true for players who travel frequently and often face no network.

In short, we can find that there are still many pain points in overseas communication needs that cannot be solved by simple translation software.

iFlytek Translator 3.0’s hat trick

In iFLYTEK's latest translation machine 3.0, we can clearly see how the translation machine product solves the above problems.

The first are two "special abilities", dialect translation and industry translation.

By collecting and annotating a large amount of dialect language data, iFLYTEK has obtained a unique dialect data set to enhance the robustness of speech recognition algorithms. This includes not only Cantonese, Northeastern dialect, Sichuan dialect, and Henan dialect in Chinese, but also the rather troublesome "Indian English" and "Australian English" in foreign languages. This series of dialects can be accurately recognized, thus ensuring the correctness of translation.

Faced with complex industry terms, iFLYTEK has accumulated expert knowledge based on industry data and built knowledge graphs for different industries, including seven industries such as sports, medical, finance, and law. In this way, it can effectively avoid translation errors caused by the different meanings of the same word in different industry terms, provide more professional and accurate translations, and facilitate those who live and work overseas to cope with communication needs in different occasions.

In addition to its special capabilities, iFlytek's solid "basic skills" can also be seen in iFlytek Translator 3.0.

These include an original self-evolving offline engine that supports translation needs in weak or no network conditions through the coordination of terminal computing power and the engine. It also has the ability to translate by taking photos, extracting text from images through OCR recognition, and thus meeting text translation needs other than voice on paper, road signs, menus, etc.

From special abilities to basic skills, iFLYTEK Translator 3.0 performs a beautiful hat trick to meet people's three levels of needs in translation.

1. Wide range of communication objects. In addition to communicating with service personnel and other objects that use the official language standard, people also need to communicate with non-service personnel, such as doctors in pharmacies, police officers in police stations, etc. If you work, study and live overseas, you will have to deal with a variety of local residents. The ability to translate dialects can meet people's needs in this regard.

2. In-depth communication content. As China goes further and further on the road of internationalization, our needs for overseas communication are becoming more and more diverse. A large number of Chinese people are beginning to go overseas to invest, work, and study, and the number of professional fields involved is also increasing. Only by becoming more and more industry translation capabilities can we meet this trend.

3. Stability in communication ability. If you want people to trust and even rely on technology, it is important to maintain stable performance in various environments. This includes different network environments and different translation content media. If a person wants to rely on machine translation capabilities to travel smoothly or even work overseas, he or she naturally needs the translation machine to run smoothly in various network environments and be able to cope with various translation needs such as voice, text, and images.

The bricks and stones of the Tower of Babel: iFLYTEK's technical confidence

Just like on the court, the magical hat trick is not a miracle from the sky, but the result of the players' long-term accumulation.

iFLYTEK Translator 3.0 meets the three-level requirements, which is rooted in iFLYTEK's accumulation of machine translation technology.

iFLYTEK's translation technology is driven by neural network machine translation. Compared with statistical machine translation technology, neural network machine translation can vectorize sentences, convert them into a form that computers can understand, and then generate translations. This can greatly speed up the learning of corpus and improve the fluency of translations.

Judging from the paper "Text Classification Based on Interrupted Recurrent Neural Networks" published by iFLYTEK, iFLYTEK has used variants of CNN and RNN to capture long-distance dependency information with a new model, understand the context and context, and can also extract key phrase information well to ensure the accuracy of translation.

Based on the technical foundation, iFlytek's machine translation technology has achieved many impressive results: in 2018 and 2019, iFlytek won 20 world championships in the fields of intelligent voice and artificial intelligence, and has an international leading advantage in speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and other fields. As the first brand to apply neural network algorithms to the field of machine translation, iFlytek's Chinese-English offline translation accuracy is as high as 95%, close to the level of College English Test Band 6. The machine translation system used by iFlytek's translation machine has reached the technical standards of the National Translation Professional Qualification Certification Examination (CATTI), which is comparable to the level of professional translators; and has won the "International Speech Synthesis Competition" for fourteen consecutive years. In addition, the language recognition technology used by iFlytek's translation machine has won the CHiME Challenge (International Multi-channel Speech Separation and Recognition Competition) for two consecutive sessions. In the just-concluded Blizzard Challenge 2019 International Speech Synthesis Competition, iFlytek won the championship again and won the 14th championship of the event.

With its technical capabilities and reputation, iFLYTEK has also set AI translation standards for the entire industry - clear, understandable, accurate and beautiful. Clear, understandable, semantically accurate and linguistically beautiful. It can be seen that iFLYTEK's goal is to make machine translation reach the standards of people's daily communication and dialogue. From this standard, we can also find that the essence of translation is "communication", allowing people with different languages, cultures and industries to communicate smoothly.

Conclusion

iFlytek Translator and Wu Lei, machine translation and sports, the breaking of the dimensional wall between these seemingly unrelated fields actually proves the powerful force generated by the combination of AI and culture and sports. Behind this cooperation, it also shows iFlytek's determination to use iFlytek Translator to more efficiently enter the C-end application market.

I believe that in the future we will see that while pursuing technological heights, iFLYTEK will continue to launch more widely applicable software and hardware, empowering technological capabilities in life scenarios and allowing AI to take root and grow in real application scenarios.