China’s newest AI gadget is credit score card-sized recorder as Alibaba’s DingTalk takes on Plaud

The newest synthetic intelligence gadget in China is a credit-card sized note-taking recorder from Alibaba Group Holding’s DingTalk unit, as Chinese companies introduce rival merchandise to Plaud, the favored AI note-taker developed by a US start-up.

Alibaba-backed office collaboration platform DingTalk final month unveiled an AI-powered voice recorder – in a position to report and transcribe voices and current them in varied content material codecs corresponding to minutes – becoming a member of a wave of Chinese tech companies which can be baking AI into {hardware} merchandise.

Unveiled in late August at a company occasion commemorating the tenth anniversary of the workplace software, the DingTalk A1 recorder packs varied AI capabilities – from assembly transcriptions and summaries to real-time translation in a number of languages – right into a kind issue of comparable measurement and weight to a stack of a number of bank cards.

The recorder’s transcription functionality was developed in partnership with Alibaba’s Tongyi AI lab, utilizing over 100 million hours of audio content material for coaching, enabling it to “understand” greater than 100 languages and 30 Chinese dialects in addition to jargon throughout 200 industries, DingTalk chief government Chen Hang mentioned on the unveiling of the gadget.

Its AI-powered multilingual capacity makes it a private “AI office assistant”, as the corporate described it, permitting any workplace employee to take assembly minutes, conduct real-time translation and summarise prolonged recordings with out human intervention.

The DingTalk A1 is available in two fashions priced at 499 yuan (US$69.98) and 799 yuan. By comparability, the newly launched Plaud Note Pro is priced at US$179.