Baidu officially unveils ERNIE Bot AI chatbot

Beijing (Gasgoo)- On March 16, Chinese tech giant Baidu officially introduced its artificial intelligence chatbot, ERNIE Bot ("Wenxin Yiyan" in Chinese Pinyin), that is capable of understanding and responding to Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. 

Photo credit: Baidu

The chatbot is built on Baidu's natural language processing platform, ERNIE, which uses deep learning algorithms to analyze and understand the context of a conversation. 

ERNIE Bot can converse with users on a range of topics, including literature, business proposals, mathematics calculations, Chinese comprehension, and multimodal generations. Based on the demonstration at the event, ERNIE Bot has achieved a certain level of understanding of human intent, with its accuracy, logic, and fluency gradually approaching human level. However, Robin Li, Baidu's founder and CEO, emphasized that these large language models are still far from perfect and have plenty of room for improvement. He expects them to develop rapidly in the near future.  

Baidu also announced the invitation testing program for ERNIE Bot. Starting on March 16, the first group of users can experience the product through an invitation testing code on the official ERNIE Bot website. Additionally, Baidu AI Cloud will soon open ERNIE Bot API interface calling services for enterprise customers. 

According to Baidu, the training data for ERNIE Bot's large model includes trillions of web pages, billions of search data and image data, tens of billions of daily voice data, and a knowledge graph of 550 billion facts, allowing Baidu to be unique in processing Chinese language.

Photo credit: Baidu

In terms of multimodal generation, Robin Li showed the ability of ERNIE Bot to generate text, pictures, audio, and video. Interestingly, ERNIE Bot is even able to generate Sichuan dialect speech. However, its video generation capability is not yet open to all users at current stage due to its high cost, and will be gradually accessible in the future.

Since Baidu made public its ERNIE Bot model in February, more than 650 companies have announced their access to the ERNIE Bot ecosystem, including such automakers as Great Wall Motor, Geely, Hongqi, Dongfeng Nissan's Venucia, VOYAH, Leapmotor, JIDU, Haima Automobile, etc.