Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Yesterday, Sogou held a press conference called "New Voice, AI Future". And one of the protagonists in this conference is a recorder that we are familiar with and unfamiliar with.

To say that the recording pen is familiar with this product is probably because it was once a standard for many college students in class, and for writers such as the brain pole body, it is an indispensable tool for interviews. But it is unfamiliar because unconsciously, the product seems to have been far away from the mainstream consumer electronics market for a long time. According to the 2019-2023 report on in-depth market research and investment strategy recommendations for the recording pen industry released by the New thinking Industry Research Center, the growth of shipments in China's sound recorder industry has basically stagnated since 2017. Subsequently, there is a large-scale homogenization of products in the market. How to seize the ever-changing technological opportunities and how to gain vitality in the market has become an urgent problem to be solved.

What measures did Sogou put forward at the press conference, and can these measures help the recording pen industry break through the current predicament?

How is the recorder gradually replaced by the mobile phone?

Before we answer these questions, we need to figure out what happened to the recorder.

Although recording pens are not comparable to the general demand for products such as mobile phones and headphones, they should have a solid demand market in education, corporate meetings, interviews, and so on. Why is there such a serious industrial contraction today?

The greatest impact on the recording pen industry is the further improvement of mobile phone functions. With the continuous improvement of mobile phone radio and noise reduction technology, in some scenes where the noise interference is not so strong, more and more people begin to choose mobile phones instead of recorders.

At the same time, the continuous improvement of AI technology further weakens the application value of the recorder. For work processing, the efficiency of audio processing is obviously much lower than that of words. Even when using recorders, we often export recordings and convert them into text through software. Now most AI voice transcription software is laid out on the mobile side, which makes it very convenient for mobile phones to record and convert text. There are even many AI companies trying to challenge the "real-time transcription" of manual shorthand. At this time, whether the recording pen is transferred through U disk or Bluetooth and then converted, it seems to be a lot of trouble.

But even so, the recording pen still has its irreplaceable value. For example, on many occasions, especially in schools, it is not suitable to carry mobile phones. And compared with mobile phones, the battery life and easy operation of the recorder still have an advantage.

What the industry needs now is to reshape its technological and industrial ecology.

The starting point written by Sogou's AI recording pen

To return to the subject, at this press conference, Sogou put forward two measures, one is to open Sogou dictation services to the recording machine industry, and the other is to unite with traditional recording pen manufacturers such as Patriot, Newman, Sony, Wancheng Group, and so on, to establish the AI Innovation Alliance.

To understand Sogou's tricks, we can start with Sogou's AI recorder C1.

Sogou AI recorder C1 was released this spring and launched a dazzling color version with a new look. In addition to routinely improving recording quality through noise reduction algorithms, automatic gain and other technologies, Sogou AI recorder C1 also provides a series of innovative functions-recording to text, simultaneous interpretation, cloud storage. In other words, during the recording process, the audio is converted into text and can be operated across terminals through cloud storage.

In this way, the application of voice recorders no longer need to be passed back and forth between mobile phones and computers, or reply to listening and rewriting, in order to achieve efficient text editing.

The launch of this product is actually a re-giving of the attributes of the recording pen tool. Since then, the recorder has changed from a tool for providing recording to a tool for converting live recordings into documents.

This degree of efficiency improvement is enough to pry the market, Sogou AI recorder C1 in a very short time in a number of e-commerce platforms to achieve the first position in single product sales. But for the recording pen industry as a whole, it is clear that one product is not enough.

Vertical and horizontal skills: a dose of technical therapy for the recording pen industry

Sogou's vertical and horizontal technique is to open up the technical system of dictation service that has been successfully tested on his own products to the entire industry, through a dose of accurate "technical therapy", to reinvigorate the entire sound recorder industry.

To put it simply, vertical and horizontal techniques empower the recording pen industry in two aspects.

On the one hand, technological empowerment.

As a veteran player in the field of input method, Sogou spends a lot of time and frequency in dealing with voice transcription technology. In real-time speech transcription, Sogou uses the self-developed delay-controllable Adaptive Attention-based model; in the non-real-time speech transcription function, it uses the industry-leading Transformer-based end-to-end speech recognition technology. The combination of the two technologies not only meets the needs of different scenarios, but also enables voice transcription accuracy to reach more than 95%, and supports one hour audio as soon as 5 minutes. No matter in terms of recognition accuracy or rewriting speed, it is not inferior to the mainstream AI rewriting software on the market.

Because of the natural differences between spoken and written languages, people often encounter some detailed problems in machine voice transcription, such as inability to distinguish the object of speech, word order disorder does not conform to reading habits, punctuation errors and so on. As a result, even if the transfer is completed by the machine, it often needs to be sorted out manually, which is obviously very inefficient.

On the other hand, Sogou is familiar with the processing of text content based on the data used by users in the input method products, and provides users with functions such as intelligent error correction, intelligent text smoothness, punctuation prediction and so on through intelligent auxiliary editoring. and then further improve the efficiency of the recording pen.

On the other hand, growth empowerment.

Input method products bring Sogou not only the accumulation of technology, but also a huge flow pool. At present, Sogou Input's APP side has more than 450 million daily active users, and the PC side occupies 99% of the market share. Now this huge traffic pool has been connected with Sogou's intelligent transfer service, and more and more users will apply this service in the future.

This means that Sogou's ability to open up the recording pen in speech recognition, intelligent error correction, and so on will be continuously honed and improved in repeated applications, and a steady stream of new slang and new terms can be synchronized through the cloud. The growth system of the technical capability of recording pen products has been guaranteed, and its tool value has shown a steady rise in the long run.

The art of manipulation: a broader space for industrial transformation than products.

As important as vertical and horizontal skills is Sogou's "close technique"-the establishment of the AI Innovation Alliance.

In the above vertical and horizontal technique, what we see is to improve the work efficiency of the recorder and reshape its tool value through AI empowerment, so that the recorder has the possibility to "recapture" its own market. But for this industry with a long history, can it produce other sparks besides competing for territory with mobile phones?

The answer is, of course, yes.

For example, the recording pen industry flows into a large amount of voice data all the time, including different languages and different vertical fields. if these precious data can be retained and used, it can be of great value.

For example, sound recorders have always relied on a single hardware profit model, and now, with the improvement of technical capabilities, lowering the threshold for hardware access, making profits through software, or creating mobile software to develop advertising revenue, and so on, are all possible for the sound recording industry to open up sources of income.

What is more important is the existence of the word "AI" in AI innovation alliance. Sogou as an AI enterprise, and recording pen such a hardware industry can collide with more than just a few new products. The radio experience and technology mastered by the recording pen industry, and the advantages accumulated in the supply chain, combined with Sogou's AI capabilities, will bring benefits to stimulate innovation in the industry as a whole, far beyond our imagination.

Thus it can be seen that the maneuver of Sogou's joint recording pen industry not only reactivates a hardware product that does not adapt to the current application scene, but also gives the entire industry unlimited room and possibility for transformation, so that they can better keep up with the technology tide.

The art of vertical and horizontal manipulation is not to build an industry for sound recorders, but Sogou's attitude towards the industrial world.

Since 2018, industrial AI, industrial Internet and other words have emerged one after another, and their concepts are all similar-to better transform traditional industries with AI technology. Sogou has also found his own "art of war", from the input of technology to the kneading of partners, all contributing to the big project of technological upgrading of the industry as a whole.

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