Li Xuanfong: How do grassroots entrepreneurs get past the initial threshold?

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Yesterday is the first anniversary of the official release of the product, an instant venture for more than a year. Just pumping brother manuscripts to me, I hope I write an article to share the experience of entrepreneurship. Share is not, here just to say some of their own experience, and the industry a little shallow view, said the wrong place despite the brick.

First, groping for six months before starting into the circle

I am the science of the financial Ring Professional, master environmental Engineering, engaged in atmospheric pollution Prediction Model research. Beijing recently noisy PM2.5 events can be said to be my line, shame is that they forget almost, and finally stumbled into the mobile Internet circle, an instant has been more than a year.

I am in the company mainly responsible for external this piece, just start two eyes a smear, no one knows, also do not know how to enter this circle. Only know how to find ways to squeeze in this circle, fortunately at that time in Beijing, has a unique advantage. Now summed up on the two: offline, the circle of large and small parties, road show, competition, what all participate in the line, the circle of well-known big guy, media, science and technology blog are concerned about, the daily must see, bad supplement related knowledge. Finally about six months time, the circle of investors, media friends have known some of the mobile internet has a deeper understanding, slowly into this circle.

Generally speaking, the Internet circle is more equal, the atmosphere is active, but a little impetuous, sometimes feel like entertainment circle, saliva war constantly.

Second, frankly facing the Giants competition

The first to cut into the field of Chinese voice assistant: User growth data is very beautiful, investors continue to seek interviews, from time to time there are media contact reports, everything seems so beautiful, smooth a bit abnormal, but the team soberly aware of the severe test is still in the back.

Sure enough, when competitors, especially the Giants, entered the field, they immediately felt the power of the Giants. The competition between the two sides is three-dimensional, all-round, including products, operations, channels, publicity and other levels of competitiveness.

You will find that the giant's products easily squeezed into a prominent position in various channels, the media coverage, various industry meetings to give their products awards, insiders praise. At the same time, investors are starting to stay away from you and start watching, fearing that you won't be able to get far.

The resources on both sides are not at all at one level, especially products like ours, inadvertently entering the so-called death penalty zone. A lot of investors out of good intentions, advised us to take a temporary lead, quickly recognize a giant when the father. In the entertainment circle, the father of the Internet is in charge.

We have chosen to stick to the straight, because there is no time to worry, anxiety. This more than a year, we conscientiously do products, continuous innovation, rapid implementation, and strive to strive for all aspects of resources, in the competition with the Giants did not fall downwind, with the strength to win their respect, this is we are deeply proud of the thing.

When will the Chinese speech assistant break out

Remember last March when a media interview, the host said the voice may be the same as the lbs fate, and ultimately just become an application of a plug-in. At that time, I expressed a different view, voice will become an important gateway to the mobile internet, voice assistant one year later may become the Smart machine standard. Now, this judgment is basically accurate. It should be noted that speech is not just speech recognition, but more about semantic recognition, and the infinite possibilities that it will explode with many vertical domains.

Now there are a series of bottlenecks in the maturity of voice assistant products: If the speech recognition rate is not high, often will appear the situation which does not recognize, the user habit nurturance needs time, the network speed is slow, the WiFi is not popular, the Internet expense is high, the handset and so on hardware support is insufficient, the semantic recognition rate is not high, the response in the intelligence insufficiency.

But we think that in 2-3 years these obstacles will be solved: the large-scale application of the depth neural network (DNN) will make the speech recognition rate more than 90%, close to the ear recognition rate, then the speech recognition will achieve the very ideal effect, the micro-credit user has more than 300 million, the user uses the pronunciation habit to develop gradually; Operators are pushing up 3G and even 4G network coverage, the construction of wireless city, intelligent city, network problems will also be resolved to a large extent; Similarly, as the Voice assistant becomes the standard of the smart machine, the manufacturer will give enough support at the hardware level, and finally, the semantic recognition, its technical threshold is higher, the latent value is also the biggest, How far the voice assistant can go also depends on it, and once the ceiling breaks, the potential for Chinese voice helper products will explode.

Many people in the industry think that the future voice assistant is actually mobile search another form, to some extent can be so understood, but if so concluded that the voice assistant is actually speech search, the search technology behind the same may need to be discussed. The core technology of Chinese voice assistant is natural language processing, the search for a company may have some foundation, but there is no special lead, which can be seen from the products introduced. Semantic recognition in the global scope of the forefront of the field, the companies in this field are not too much accumulation, basically in the same starting line. If you use the idea of search to do voice assistant such products, may be off the road.

Many people ignore this: Siri itself does not do speech recognition, it is more focused on semantic parsing. At the end of 2011, Yalim K. Gerger that Siri marked the beginning of the sixth Scientific Revolution: artificial Intelligence, and that the maturation of natural language processing technology would be an indispensable step towards the era of human intelligence.

Based on this judgment, we think that if there is a new idea and algorithm to make the natural language processing technology made great progress, Chinese voice helper products can gradually mature.

Therefore, we developed the first Chinese semantic parsing engine-semantic cloud. On the one hand, to serve the vast number of developers, so that its application with natural language understanding ability to achieve intelligent interaction, on the other hand, enhance our semantic parsing ability, which makes voice assistants more intelligent.

Our other killer is a new set of algorithms being developed, called Artificial intelligence, that will have contextual understanding as well as logical reasoning, affective analysis capabilities, and this algorithm will be open to developers through "semantic cloud".

Four, the threshold for entrepreneurship has become higher

The advent of mobile internet makes the Giants feel fear and uneasiness, they are looking for the direction of the telescope, see the opportunity to rush up, do not give you gasp time. It seems that there are many opportunities, not much, and there are fewer opportunities for grassroots entrepreneurs; the plump prairie is encirclements and the rest is probably swamp.

The threshold for entrepreneurship seems to be lower, actually higher. Mobile Internet explosive growth, the whole team is very demanding, there is not much time to leave you to grow and learn. It's like you're racing on the freeway, it's exciting, but if you're not good at it, it's likely to ruin your car.

The vast majority of users ranked by the top of the products, almost all of the army of the Giants, some of the limelight in the circle of the start-up companies are also most of the family, or with a large company executives background, or belong to the senior Insiders, resource experience is relatively rich, real grass-roots development of the product is

In addition, there are too few media outlets willing to report start-ups, especially grassroots entrepreneurial teams, and investors are paying less attention.

Even so, mobile internet still has a lot of opportunities, if miss this wave may at least wait ten years. How many ten years are there in life?