Smart technology making people's daily lives easier
An automatic coffee machine can receive an order from Alipay's smart voice assistant and a trial service covers around a dozen mini programs of tea and coffee brands.
The latest advancements in large language models would allow much easier access for ordinary people to fully leverage the potential of artificial intelligence, with leading players showcasing their latest developments at the ongoing World Artificial Intelligence Conference and its fair in Shanghai.
Smart assistants for leisure activities, daily life and professional work are highlighted at the show.
Users are able to order coffee through Alipay's built-in smart assistant, simply by saying: "I want to order a cup of Starbucks medium iced latte," and the relevant mini program will place the order following confirmation and payment.
The beverage will be ready to be picked up at the designated store.
A trial service became available for selected users in April, and now covers around a dozen mini programs of tea and coffee brands such as Starbucks, Luckin, Heytea, Chagee and Mixue.
AI systems trained with multiple modes of data, or so-called Multimodal LLMs would unleash more potential under different scenarios such as smart assistant, autonomous driving and graphic recognition, industry experts said.
During the conference, Ant Group also joined with nearly two dozen health-care organizations to initiate a program to work on technology breakthroughs and expand AI-backed intelligent medical solutions.
Smart conversational robots are already available at the Shanghai First People's Hospital to help patients find the suitable hospital departments and give real-time guidance when patients book an appointment through its smart voice assistant.
Visitors examine a smart application that creates animated photos and turns portraits into cartoons.
One of Tencent Youtu Lab's popular applications that creates animated photos and turns portraits into cartoons also drew visitors at the exhibition.
Wu Yunsheng, vice-president of Tencent Cloud and head of Tencent Cloud Intelligence, believes the application of LLMs in various industry sectors would accelerate in the future given rising demand and higher capability of the models.
One of its AI applications in the health-care sector is to help Ruijin Hospital collate medical records which could help physicians save time.
Alibaba Cloud's booth shows how smart assistants help with daily life, work and study.
Smart assistants powered by Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Qianwen AI models including news briefing, chatbots, work and study efficiency tools also attracted attention.
The total number of downloads of its large language and audio models jumped 200 percent in the past two months and exceeded 20 million times, as developers of different size embrace the open-source ecosystem, according to Zhou Jingren, Alibaba Cloud's chief technology officer.
It already covers industry segments like consumer electronics, automobiles, education, healthcare, culture, and tourism and gaming thanks to the rising number of parameters of AI models.
For example, online travel portal Trip.com is using Tongyi Qianwen's models to extract information from foreign language texts such as Thai, Hebrew, Arabic to help summarizing travel information and online reviews.
