Families have fun day out learning about AI

World Artificial Intelligence 2024, where companies, research institutions and organizations are displaying their latest technology and products, has proved popular with families.

Fan Xiao and his wife took their 7-year-old daughter to the exhibition on Saturday. They watched displays by robots, tried their hands at coding and interacted with AI-empowered educational products.

"I'm working in the AI and big model industry and believe that it's an inevitable trend that AI will play a big role in every walk of life, so I took my daughter here to experience the latest trends," said Fan.

"Education of AI should start from childhood to make children AI natives."

Parents and children found several educational training companies have developed products based on their own large models, which can make teaching and learning more efficient.

TAL Education Group's learning laptop and its MathGPT attracted crowds of parents and educators at the exhibition.

The laptop has been embedded with all interactive video courses for primary to high school students so that students can learn at home by themselves or with help from their parents. The MathGPT can help students analyze and solve problems they cannot solve step by step.

"At the primary stage of AI, students can get the answers directly by simply taking a photo of the question and submitting it, which may not have made the student understand," said Tian Mi, chief technology officer of TAL.

"Our new product will not give the answer directly, but guide the student to learn what they need to know to solve the problem, which I think is the basic mission of education. It also encourages students to ask questions during the process and develop critical thinking, which is more valuable."

Yuanli Technologies, formerly known as Ape Tutoring, is displaying a variety of products, ranging from course resources and homework management assistants, to tailored AI tutors, to digital oral English practice partners.

At the booth of Youdao, which was formerly known for its digital dictionary and translation services, visitors queued up to try its "Hi Echo" oral English tutor, which has six digital avatars to choose from, and can speak with users, assess their performance and give advice on improvements.

"AI has shown its power in some scenarios, such as accompanying children in learning and helping children with practising language skills," said Fan.

"My daughter can talk with chatting robots for hours and the AI machines can also answer endless questions from children with stable emotion, which might be difficult for some parents."

Gong Yiping, father of a middle school student, said the AI tutors can be helpful as it's not easy to find cramming schools now with many losed under stricter regulations by the government in attempt to reducing excessive burdens on students.

"These tools can help students learn, but I also hope that the developers can design some functions for parents to monitor students' operation as sometimes children would skip the process to find the answers," he said.

Most visitors may have experienced at forums the real-time voice-to-text conversion service of iFLYTEK, but they were surprised to see a digital blackboard it's displaying at the WAIC exhibition.

Based on the iFLYTEK Spark large model, which released its 4.0 version recently, it can quickly turn teachers' writing and drawings on blackboards into digital forms, then spin or unfold them to better illustrate to students. It can also quickly pull up digital teaching materials like videos in its database to make the class more interesting and understandable.

"The AI products are easy to use, but it also pushes me to think about the role of teachers in the future as AI is so capable," said Zhou Shanshan, a Chinese education major at East China Normal University.

"The exhibition makes more aware of the necessity to keep learning and improve my own capability with the help of AI to improve my competitiveness in the career market in the future."

Tian said there is a great potential for AI in education and it will not be surprise for each student to have a personal AI teacher in the future.

"There will be challenges for teachers, but teachers will not be replaced by AI," he said. "AI can help teachers with repeated and routine work, such as knowledge explanation and homework review. It can accompany children 24 hours a day and answer any question, so that students don't have to be afraid of asking questions, even some sound silly, and doing it repeatedly to fully understand the content.

"But teachers are irreplaceable in caring for kids, inspiring their interest and encouraging them in studying."