China Mobile squares up to Siri with voice portal
How do you rate your chances in China now, Siri?
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China Mobile, is set to launch its own Siri-like voice assistant service on Wednesday, a move which will provide more unwelcome local competition for Apple in the world’s biggest smartphone market.
The carrier, which is the world’s largest by subscribers, will unveil its “intelligent voice portal” at its global developers conference in Guangzhou, according to Marbridge Daily.
The portal is apparently based on the YuDian voice assistant product from Chinese firm Anhui USTC iFlytek – the country’s most successful voice recognition firm – in which China Mobile took a 15 per cent stake back in August.
It will allow users to dial numbers and send texts, and listen to incoming calls and other information, as well as access other back-end services such as China Mobile’s 12580 information hotline which includes entertainment, travel, hotel and tourist info.
Although all-but unknown outside of China, USTC iFlytek, boasts an ecosystem of over 10,000 partners and developers and user numbers for its text-to-speech and voice recognition tech in the hundreds of millions.
The firm told The Reg it has the edge on Siri thanks to its native Chinese expertise – the tonal nature of the language of Mandarin and Cantonese making them particularly difficult to recognise.
It also boasted of its underlying ‘voice cloud’ platform which has now amassed a huge database of differently accented speech which can be used to make the services offered on top, such as YuDian, more accurate.
For its part, Siri will get another chance to win hearts and minds in the ultra-competitive China smartphone market with the launch of the iPhone 5, which is slated for December 15.
However, China Mobile has still not managed to reach an agreement with Apple, allowing rivals China Telecom and China Unicom to battle it out for the hard-earned cash of the country’s fanbois.
China Mobile couldn't immediately be reached for comment. ®
COMMENTS
Re: China mobile is so big...
Design.
Basically, if CM were to have a Foxconn-a-like build their own branded smartphones for use on their own ecosystem the whole lot would have to be beautifully designed and constantly innovated/upgraded because, with smartphones, if you can't have the New Shiny on one network you can jump ship to another who will give you your toy.
It would be a big risk to their huge market share to go that way when hardware and UI design isn't their core business strength as opposed to the likes of The Fruity Company or HTC, for example. Not to say they couldn't theoretically do so, as you suggest, just that it would be a strange race for them to enter, considering the risks, for the possible extra revenue from owning the whole experience.
China mobile is so big, I wonder if they may someday try to own their entire ecosystem
Create their own Android fork, using their own maps, app store and so on. Have a manufacturer like Foxconn make their own branded phones. They are state owned, if they decided that only the phones they produce could be used on their network, there would be no one to tell them that's wrong or anticompetitive. Suddenly China Mobile owns 70% of the mobile phone market in China, with Lenovo, Samsung, Apple and the rest fighting for the scraps on the two smaller carriers.
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