Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 Review: From scanning to pointing, offline recognition speed increased by 20%

As a pioneer in the dictionary pen industry, NetEase Youdao is not satisfied with its current achievements, but always keeps abreast of industry trends and consumer needs, and strives to maintain its first-mover advantage in products. For example, only half a year after the launch of Youdao Dictionary Pen Professional Edition, NetEase Youdao updated its dictionary pen product line and launched Youdao Dictionary Pen 3.

Although NetEase Youdao has its own product rhythm, it is inevitable that friends who are interested in dictionary pen devices will feel curious: As a product with relatively single functions, what is the reason for the frequent updates of Youdao Dictionary Pen?

In fact, once we understand the product highlights of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 and consider it in the context of the entire industry, we will find that Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 not only cleverly empowers students with cutting-edge technology, but also sets an all-round dictionary pen example for the industry.

Interactive reading, the child's "personal language teacher"

Different from previous generations of Youdao Dictionary Pen that focused on professional office and life scenarios, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 takes into account the language learning needs of young children and thus adds the function of interactive point reading.

In terms of function, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 also fully considers the casualness of children's operation, and thus simplifies the scanning logic to the greatest extent - children only need to tap the accompanying picture book to start "interactive reading".

In order to test the interactive point reading function of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3, we found a popular children's book "A Collection of David Shannon's Award-winning Works" from the accompanying picture books. In the actual test, we only need to use Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 to click on the picture book, and the corresponding animation, English dialogue and corresponding English interpretation will appear on the screen.

On this basis, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 has also added an interesting follow-up reading function, which can guide children to follow the corresponding content through animations, and reward children with medals, thereby enhancing children's enthusiasm for learning.

From the content point of view, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 includes many copyrighted picture books that are popular among children. NetEase Youdao has reached cooperation with many leading publishing institutions in the industry, including Xuele, Tongqu, and Xiaoxiang Chinese Character Series Books, and has jointly launched classic picture book series such as "Big Red Dog", "Magic School Bus", and "David Shannon". In addition, NetEase Youdao has invested 100 million yuan to launch the "Magic Pen Ma Liang Plan" to encourage high-quality original authors, introduce millions of dictionary pen user traffic, promote children's original content, and try to build a growth platform for nurturing excellent content. This ensures that Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 has a steady supply of content reserves.

After experiencing the interactive point-to-read function of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3, we can clearly feel that NetEase Youdao has a strong insight into the pain points of young children learning languages. This profound product orientation is not only revealed through minimalist interactions, but also reflected in the presentation of a whole set of content. For example, when a child clicks on a picture, the screen does not only display an English sentence, but also displays a smart animation, which ensures that the child will not feel repulsive to the content, but instead acquires knowledge through interesting interactions.

Based on actual tests, the innovation of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 interactive reading lies in that on the one hand, it can subtly enhance children's interest in English through immersive reading, and is equipped with functions such as follow-up reading, natural spelling, and interactive answering to better help children remember. On the other hand, it can prevent parents from having a negative impact on their children due to their own inaccurate pronunciation and poor English.

Super fast point search + whole sentence scanning, more suitable for students

It is worth noting that since the hardware quality of the machine itself is excellent enough, in addition to young children, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3's "super-fast point search" and "whole sentence scanning" are also of great help to students.

For example, if students encounter unfamiliar words during study, they only need to use the "ultra-fast search" function of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 to click on the unfamiliar words, and the latter will give the corresponding definition and pure British and American pronunciation. On this basis, once students follow the reading in real time, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 can also give corresponding scores, cleverly helping students to find weak points in pronunciation and improve their oral skills.

After actual testing, the "super-fast point-to-point lookup" function of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 is indeed as fast as it sounds. According to Youdao's official introduction, since the camera of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 supports a wide angle and the camera only takes 8 milliseconds to take a picture, Youdao Dictionary Pen can complete the recognition almost at the moment when our pen tip touches the word. This is undoubtedly very attractive to students who need immersive learning.

We selected an English article and asked Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 to randomly "check" some words. After actual testing, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 can recognize the corresponding words and give corresponding instructions almost at the moment of clicking. It has achieved the goal of "clicking where you don't understand" in practice.

In order to better meet the needs of "point-to-point checking", NetEase Youdao has made a new upgrade to the pen tip of the Dictionary Pen 3.

Although the point-to-point search function can help us look up words quickly, it is difficult to meet the translation needs of some long and difficult sentences. At this time, the "whole sentence scan" of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 can serve as a good supplement.

We chose to let Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 scan a passage from the English novel "The Three-Body Problem". The result was similar to Diancha. Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 can not only quickly recognize all the words, but also give the corresponding translation content in a very short time, making it a master of English CET-8.

It is worth mentioning here that unlike traditional devices that must be connected to the Internet for translation, NetEase Youdao has obviously taken into account the fact that students cannot always be connected to the Internet due to their special status, so Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 can also translate freely even when there is no Internet. According to Youdao's official introduction, the offline neural network on the Dictionary Pen 3 is 20% faster than the original one, and the average recognition accuracy has increased from 95.5% to 98.3%. Therefore, this product feature of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 is undoubtedly extremely suitable for students' lives.

In addition to foreign language learning, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3's Chinese learning function is equally impressive.

According to Youdao's official introduction, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 supports direct scanning and recognition of Chinese proverbs, idioms, poems, ancient Chinese and other content in the Chinese context without the need for additional settings.

In this regard, we chose to let Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 scan Tuo Binwang's "Geese, Geese, Geese". The result was similar to scanning English. Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 recognized the poem immediately and also presented the pronunciation, appreciation and other information of "Geese, Geese, Geese". Considering that rare characters often appear in ancient poems and the connotation is not easy to understand, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 can obviously greatly help students understand Chinese classical culture.

A life assistant

Although the function focus of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 is more inclined towards learning scenarios, it does not mean that Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 is only confined to learning scenarios. In fact, even in life and work scenarios, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 has a strong place to use.

First of all, from the perspective of the workplace, although most people in the workplace currently have a decent level of English, considering that English is not our native language after all, we will inevitably get stuck when encountering some uncommon characters.

Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 covers a huge vocabulary of 2.75 million words, including the copyrights of many authoritative dictionaries such as Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Chinese-English Dictionary, and Professional Examination Dictionary. Therefore, it can greatly help professionals translate some professional English trade documents, journals, etc.

Secondly, in life, many girls may need to buy some overseas cosmetics and skin care products, but because they cannot see the content of overseas cosmetics, it is easy to buy the wrong products. In this context, we only need to scan the Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 to quickly obtain the Chinese information behind the cosmetics, which is definitely a travel shopping tool.

2.97-inch large screen is more sci-fi

Although the overall appearance of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 has not changed much compared to previous generations of products, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 still has its own characteristics in details.

In order to display more content, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 not only canceled the Home button on the front of the body, but also expanded the screen on the front of the body to 2.97 inches. Considering that the current mainstream level of the dictionary pen industry is still hovering around the small screen dimension of 1 inch that does not support touch, it also highlights the sci-fi feel of Youdao Dictionary Pen 3.

Although Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 no longer uses the design of the Home button on the front, it does not mean that Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 does not have the Home function - Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 splits the previous power button into two, one of which becomes the Home button we are familiar with. Compared with the previous generation, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 moves the Home button from the front to the side, which can greatly expand the screen size on the one hand, and also takes into account humanized interaction on the other hand, which also demonstrates the strong industrial design capabilities of NetEase Youdao.

It is worth noting that although the design of the Youdao Dictionary Pen 3's pen head is exactly the same as the previous generations in appearance, its internal structure is quite different. According to Youdao, the Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 is equipped with the world's first super-sensing optical system, which is compatible with the automatic judgment and recognition of the two major AI technologies of OCR and OID - this is also the fundamental reason why the Dictionary Pen 3 mentioned above can simultaneously bring a revolutionary experience of point-to-point search, interactive point-to-read, and scan-to-search.

In general, although Youdao Dictionary Pen has only reached version 3, the product does not have the immaturity of the early electronic product iteration. Therefore, whether from the perspective of ultra-fast point-to-point search and interactive point-to-point reading technology or product positioning, Youdao Dictionary Pen 3 can be regarded as a benchmark product in the dictionary pen market.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.