Duer: Intelligent Personal Assistant

Abstract

Intelligent personal assistant is widely recognized as a more natural and efficient way of human-computer interaction, which has attracted extensive interests from both academia and industry. In this talk, I describe Duer, Baidu's intelligent personal assistant. In particular, I would like to focus on the following three features. Firstly, Duer comprehensively understands people's requirements via multiple channels, including not only explicit utterances, but also user models and rich contexts. Duer's user models are learnt from users' interaction history, and the rich contexts consist of temporal and geographical information, as well as the foregoing dialogues. Secondly, Duer meets diverse requirements with a range of instruments, such as chatting, information provision, reminder service, etc. These instruments are implemented based on mining the big data of web pages, applications, and user logs, which are then seamlessly integrated in the dialogue flow. Thirdly, Duer features multi-modal interaction, which allows people to interact with it by means of texts, speech, and images. We believe the above features will enable Duer to become a better and distinguished intelligent assistant for each of you.