By Gabby Chen

(JW Insights) Apr 6 --Several Chinese home appliance and car makers will adopt Baidu's ChatGBT-like AI chatbot Ernie Bot system to provide better human-machine interaction experience for their products and services, reported China Daily on April 4.

They include home appliance makers Midea Group, Hisense, and Sichuan Changhong Electric, as well as automakers such as Jidu Auto, Changan, and Geely.

Midea Group, based in Foshan city in southern China's Guangdong Province, is among the first batch of partners for Ernie Bot since its launch in March. Midea will bolster the upgrade of human-machine conversation abilities in the smart home sector through leveraging cutting-edge generative AI technology, said the China Daily report.

The company said its smart home products and family service robots will have access to Baidu's Ernie Bot, which has showcased its capabilities in fields like literary creation, business writing, mathematical calculation and Chinese language understanding. The two companies will carry out in-depth cooperation in the research and development of AI and frontier technologies.

Meanwhile, Hisense Visual Technology Co Ltd, a Qingdao, eastern China's Shandong Province-based home appliance company, has also joined the Ernie Bot ecosystem to integrate Baidu's intelligent conversational technology into its televisions and large-sized displays, said the report.

Liu Fei, research director of the consumer electronics department at Beijing-based market consultancy All View Cloud, said, "The emergence of new AI technologies will better facilitate the conversational interaction between human beings and home appliance products. The collaboration between household appliance makers and conversational chatbot developers will speed up the digital and intelligent transformation of China's home appliance industry."

AVC data showed the revenue of China's home appliance sector reached RMB708.1 billion ($103.1 billion) in 2022, down 7.4% year-on-year.

In addition to the home appliance sector, comparable applications are expected to add value to electric and assisted-driving cars. Smart electric vehicle company Jidu Auto, a joint venture established by Baidu and carmaker Geely Holding Group, said it will integrate Ernie Bot into its cars to develop the world's first large language model-powered AI interactive experience for smart vehicles.

Chinese carmaker Changan launched its Yida sedan last month, which is the first mass-produced model in China to feature Ernie Bot. The Yida will improve users' interactivity with itself, Changan said. Other Chinese automakers such as Geely, Dongfeng Nissan and China FAW Group's Hongqi have also participated in the Ernie Bot ecosystem, the China Daily report noted.

Pan Helin, co-director of the Digital Economy and Financial Innovation Research Center at Zhejiang University's International Business School, said more efforts should be made to improve computing power, algorithms and quality of data. Similarly, investment in basic scientific research, including mathematics, statistics and computer science, should be increased, given that Ernie Bot still has some deficiencies in machine learning and natural language processing capabilities.

Industry experts said the application of ChatGPT-related and AI-generated content technologies is likely to bolster the intelligent transformation and upgrade of the traditional household appliance industry and serve as a new engine driving consumption recovery.

In addition, leading Chinese technology companies, such as Alibaba Group, JD, iFlytek and NetEase, are already seeking to develop Chinese-language alternatives to ChatGPT, according to the China Daily report.