Sogou to ramp up artificial intelligence funding
Sogou Inc, which operates China’s second-largest search engine, plans to increase investment in artificial intelligence and develop healthcareand law-related Q&A services, in a bid to accelerate the commercialization of AI in its businesses.
“Our AI strategy concentrates on human-computer interaction and language processing. We focused on the search business before going public, but we will input more resources to upgrade the input method,” said Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou.
“We are going to make our input method more intelligent and help you express better, just as a human secretary would.”
The company has two core products. One is the search engine, which provides knowledge and answers people’s questions; the other is the input method for search engines.
Sogou search is the world’s first search engine that supports crosslanguage retrieval, which means, for example, that users can type in Chinese, then retrieve the information in English, according to Wang.
“Different from the voice assistant that stands on the opposite side and answers your questions, the input method is with you and helps you answer others’ questions,” Wang explained.
The company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange last month and raised $585 million in an initial public offering. Wang said he hopes the IPO will make it easier to cooperate with US tech companies.
Depending on its capacity in human-machine interaction, Sogou will prioritize healthcare and lawrelated Q&A services.
“You ask questions, and then the machine talks with you and finally provides you with statistics and advice, not just a series of links,” Wang said.
“The machine will become a private legal adviser or personal physician in the future, so there is an opportunity to develop the paid users’ business.”
He added with the further advancement of AI, their products can help users obtain and express information better. It has launched a lip-reading machine, which can understand what users are asking just through their lip movements.
“It is inevitable that machines will gradually replace people to some degrees, but people will be liberated to do something creative. So many jobs will disappear, but more jobs will be created.”
Beijing-based Sogou is a unit of China’s Sohu.com Inc, an internet service company that includes search and gaming platforms. It is the fourth-largest internet company in China, based on monthly active users in September, according to iResearch.
The company, which competes with Baidu Inc, reported net income of $66.7 million for the nine months ended Sept 30, compared with $45.4 million for the same period last year.