Sogou releases four AI voice recorders, with four core functions opening a new era of AI recording

The voice recorder industry has always been considered a "simple" industry - most voice recorders on the market are only designed to meet the recording needs of most users. Admittedly, the purpose of the voice recorder determines that "recording" must be its main theme, but this does not mean that voice recorder products cannot have greater imagination.

On February 26, 2020, Sogou held an online press conference and released four new voice recorders - Sogou AI Voice Recorder S1, E1, S1 Forbidden City Co-branded Edition and C1 PRO Forbidden City Co-branded Edition.

In fact, from the word "AI" in the name, we can know that Sogou does not intend to make a traditional voice recorder that is "indistinguishable from the crowd", but hopes to integrate AI technology with hardware to create a humanized recording product that can comprehensively solve users' recording needs.

In this sense, Sogou has indeed broken away from the product thinking of traditional voice recorders and opened up a new era of AI recording. From a functional point of view, the Sogou AI voice recorder has indeed achieved all the elements that a revolutionary should have.

To address this problem, Sogou has creatively added a super sound pickup function for long-range scenes with no blind spots.

In terms of hardware, Sogou AI Voice Recorder S1 is equipped with two Harman directional microphones, supporting a maximum pickup distance of up to 10m. It is also equipped with six omnidirectional microphones, supporting 360° omnidirectional sound pickup without dead angles. In terms of algorithms, Sogou AI Voice Recorder S1 is the first in the industry to implement AI noise reduction, comprehensively analyzing 8-channel microphone signals, and creating deep intelligent noise reduction based on the pureVoice AI noise reduction algorithm, filtering more than 40,000 real noises in real time, making the human voice in the recording clearer.

On the one hand, Sogou AI voice recorder can clearly record sound even if the distance to the recorder is far away. On the other hand, through intelligent noise reduction, Sogou AI voice recorder can cleverly filter out useless sound information. The combination of these two factors directly makes Sogou AI voice recorder the industry's first recording product that is no longer restricted to special usage scenarios, and it has created an era of full-scene recording.

After the recording is completed, I believe that a large number of people will need to organize the content of the recording into text, and this is also the biggest disadvantage of the current traditional voice recorders - we need to type it into text while listening to the recording. It is okay for shorter recordings, but once the recording is in hours, our workload will increase exponentially.

Therefore, Sogou introduced the function of real-time transcription of recordings, and maintained the transcription accuracy rate ahead of the industry level. The transcription accuracy rate of the new Sogou AI voice recorder has reached 98%.

According to Sogou, through AI real-time association and Sogou input method vocabulary synchronization, Sogou AI voice recorder S1 can achieve "recording for 1 hour and producing manuscript in 5 minutes". In other words, it only takes a few minutes to convert recording into text, and the conversion accuracy rate is as high as 98%. Compared with manual work, Sogou AI voice recorder S1 is far ahead in conversion efficiency.

Of course, Sogou has also taken into account recording scenarios in different languages ​​and dialects. In terms of text conversion, it supports the recognition of 10 languages ​​such as Chinese, English, and Japanese, as well as 10 dialects such as Cantonese, Sichuanese, and Hebeiese. It has also conducted in-depth learning on the unique vocabulary in five fields, including finance and trade, medical care, and IT technology. This has greatly expanded the use scenarios of Sogou AI voice recorders.

Interestingly, Sogou AI voice recorder also has enhanced recognition capabilities - it can recognize different speakers, as well as applause and laughter, helping users to accurately record sounds.

From the perspective of the recording industry, the accurate transcription function can greatly improve our work efficiency by converting abstract sounds into intuitive text, while greatly enhancing the intuitiveness of the sound.

I believe that with the increasing number of audio files, most users of traditional audio recorders can only transfer the files in the audio recorder to the computer through a wired connection, and then organize the audio files through the computer, and only support simple name tags. However, this way of archiving videos and pictures is not very friendly for abstract recordings.

In order to help users better organize recordings, Sogou pioneered the intelligent summary technology - through the Sogou Zhiyin™ NLP engine intelligent summary technology, the theme and key sentences of the recording manuscript can be automatically refined. For example, we can extract keywords from the recording to form a recording tag, which will greatly improve the intuitiveness of the recording.

When searching for recordings, we only need to say the keywords we want to search through the voice assistant, and Sogou AI Recorder S1 will present all the recordings containing the keywords. When listening back to the recordings, Sogou AI Recorder S1 can also support skipping empty recordings and filtering repeated words, filtering out useless information as much as possible, and enhancing the coherence of the recordings.

Interestingly, in order to make it easier for users to organize files, the recording files in the Sogou AI voice recorder can be synchronized in real time to different terminals such as mobile apps, web pages, PC clients, etc., which greatly facilitates our efficiency in organizing recording files across platforms.

Universal translation no longer requires "simultaneous interpretation"

In foreign language interviews, foreign language speeches and other occasions, you may feel at a loss when encountering a new language when recording, because first of all, we don’t know the scope of this language, and we don’t understand the meaning of the content in this language. In order to meet this demand, Sogou has geniusly integrated the translation function into Sogou AI Recorder S1 - that is, Sogou AI Recorder S1 supports dialogue translation function, and is the first in the industry to support free dialogue translation.

According to Sogou, Sogou AI Voice Recorder S1 supports online translation of 63 languages, and offline, it can also support translation of 9 commonly used languages ​​such as Chinese, English, and Japanese. On this basis, Sogou AI Voice Recorder S1 and E1 also support real-time simultaneous interpretation of Chinese and English, which means that these two Sogou AI voice recorders can complete tasks that could only be completed by "simultaneous interpretation" in the past.

For a long time, the voice recorder industry has been restricted by the word "recording" and seems to have fallen into a certain bottleneck. However, Sogou's pioneering thinking, diverging from the word "recording", has creatively brought four revolutionary functions: super sound pickup, accurate transcription, efficient organization, and all-round translation. This may bring new development ideas to the entire industry.

By adding these creative features to voice recorders for the first time, Sogou has established itself as a pioneer in the new era of AI recording - we can clearly feel the high appeal of this pioneer from a market perspective.

According to the data from the "2019-2023 Voice Recorder Industry In-depth Market Research and Investment Strategy Recommendation Report" released by the Xin Shijie Industry Research Center, the growth of shipments of China's voice recorder industry has basically stagnated since 2017. Sogou AI Voice Recorder C1 was launched in March 2019. Three months later, it won the sales champion and sales champion in the voice recorder category on JD.com and Tmall respectively. On Double Eleven that year, Sogou AI Voice Recorder C1 also won the single product total sales champion on both JD.com and Tmall platforms.

Considering that Sogou's two new products have made all-round breakthroughs based on the previous products, it is foreseeable that Sogou AI voice recorders will have a broader market in 2020. At the same time, as the pioneer of the earliest AI voice recorder, Sogou's advanced achievements are indeed worthy of learning for traditional players.

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.