As an important automobile manufacturing town in China, Chongqing has never lacked automobile brands. Nowadays, with the transformation of science and technology and industry, intelligent vehicles have become the key point of the transformation and upgrading of Chongqing's automobile industry.
In the first quarter of this year, Chongqing's automobile manufacturing industry contributed significantly to industrial growth, with an increase of 16.8%. Behind the data is the joint efforts of groups of automotive R&D personnel. On the occasion of the "May Fourth Youth Day", the upstream reporter interviewed Ma Hongpeng, general manager of the Chongqing Branch of iFLYTEK Intelligent Automobile, to see how the "post-80s" young science and technology experts led the team to overcome difficulties and take advantage of the momentum, use artificial intelligence to empower the development of intelligent vehicles, and help the transformation and development of Chongqing's automobile industry.
Entering the circle: Enthusiastic young people devote themselves to overseas markets to work hard for their dreams
In 2004, Ma Hongpeng, who majored in computer science, joined a well-known Japanese automotive electronics company, and thanks to the rapid development of China's automotive market, Ma Hongpeng was soon dispatched to a Japanese cooperative car company for further study.
"At that time, we went to this Japanese company, which has a 60-year history background in the automotive industry, and its accumulation is very rich." Ma Hongpeng said that in addition to systematic technical training, it is more important to carry out a new generation of intelligent development of a Japanese car that has just been introduced into China.
Ma Hongpeng, who was only in his 20s at the time, was angry about intelligent technology, but he was soon poured cold water. "At that time, Japan's automobile manufacturing technology was leading in the world, and Japanese companies felt that our Chinese personnel were only here to study, and the new generation of automobile technology still had to follow them." Ma Hongpeng said.
But soon, Ma Hongpeng proved himself with practical actions.
Ma Hongpeng said that at that time, the domestic on-board intelligent system was still in the exploration stage, in the new generation of automotive intelligent system, he first wanted to solve the fuzzy retrieval, real-time traffic and other user high demand functions, but at that time the car machine was in a closed system, there was no network, the algorithm and storage capacity of the car system itself was crucial.
"Cars and machines are not connected to the Internet, and when you search for a destination, you need to write the name in full to retrieve it." For example, Ma Hongpeng said, for example, to search for "Chongqing Yuzhong District Administrative Service Center", entering "Yuzhong District Administrative Center" can not retrieve the destination, must be completely entered.
Developing fuzzy queries within closed systems was challenging at the time. Ma Hongpeng said that this requires a large amount of data to be done in advance and stored in the hard disk of the car. Subsequently, Ma Hongpeng and his team divided keywords for road and address names across the country, and established an index database, conducted large-scale coverage testing, and optimized for inappropriate word segmentation.
The fuzzy search function, which seems familiar today, was an innovation at the time. "This was the first of its kind in China at the time, and we also applied for a national patent." The successful application for a patent made Ma Hongpeng feel full of achievements, which also impressed Japanese companies.
"From worrying and questioning to worrying about it, we have conquered Japanese companies with technology, and thus won the attention and respect of Japanese companies." Ma Hongpeng said.
Research and development: Technology to create a new pattern of human-computer interaction
After returning to China, Ma Hongpeng was promoted to the middle management of the company and led a team of more than 20 people to do platform research and development.
In 2018, China's auto market ushered in a period of rapid development, and major car companies showed their strengths. With the development and evolution of human-computer interaction of intelligent vehicles, as an important industrial base for Chinese automobiles, the Chongqing market has attracted much attention.
Ma Hongpeng's association with Chongqing also began in 2018.
At the 2018 Wisdom Expo, Liu Qingfeng, Chairman of iFLYTEK, announced that the southwest headquarters will be landed in Chongqing, and at the same time, the Chongqing branch center of iFLYTEK Intelligent Vehicles will be landed, and Ma Hongpeng will also become the general manager of the center. At the same time, iFLYTEK has also established a joint laboratory with Chongqing car companies such as Changan Automobile to cooperate in the field of technology research and development, product design and vehicle application of automotive electronics.
"Hello Xiao'an, help me check the weather in Beijing."
"Okay, Beijing has sunny weather, and the daytime temperature is 20 degrees Celsius."
"Book me another ticket there."
……
Such dialogue is very common in human-to-human communication, but for human-computer interaction, the technical difficulty of wanting to continue to dialogue with the machine and let the machine understand that "there" is the Beijing referred to above is self-evident.
"The realization of multiple instructions at a time in the car, but also the realization of contextual understanding, this kind of interaction is not before, but it is a pain point for users." Ma Hongpeng explained that for machines, machines need to remember and understand the current speaker's intentions and scenes, and they need to cover as many scenes and possible questions as possible, which will increase the complexity of the algorithm in a geometric progression, making the development and maintenance of software more difficult.
In order to achieve this intelligent operation, Ma Hongpeng led a team of more than 20 people to settle in Changan Automobile, repeated testing to form a huge scene knowledge base, "usually there are no more than 2,000 kinds of commonly used instructions in the car, but we have built nearly 6,000 commonly used instructions and nearly 20,000 uncommon instructions on the car machine to accurately realize user instructions." Ma Hongpeng said.
Another technical difficulty is how to keep the voice control system in the radio state, while the car does not give feedback on the normal communication of non-instructions? Ma Hongpeng said that they have developed and set up voiceprint recognition, sound source positioning and other systems in the car, which can accurately identify the instructions of the command issuer, and the non-instruction and daily in-car communication will not be received into the voice control system, making the voice operation in the car more intelligent and humane.
Nowadays, the Flying Fish OS equipped with these technologies has been used in Changan CS95, CS75 and other models, which has also accelerated the process of intelligent development of Chongqing automobiles.
Tackling tough problems: Conquering key technologies to help Chongqing build cars go global
Chongqing is established as an industrial city, and the automobile industry is the top priority of Chongqing's industry and one of the pillars of Chongqing's economy. As a traditional automobile town, how can Chongqing achieve a strong chain in the field of "rising out" intelligent vehicles?
Ma Hongpeng analyzed that from the perspective of the international automobile market, Europe and the United States have obvious advantages in technology and holding rate in the field of fuel vehicles, while the intelligent transformation of domestic car companies and the influx of new car-making forces are expected to lead the new track in the integration of intelligent car software + hardware.
With the development of the intelligent automobile industry, many Chongqing automobile brands have also gone to the international market. Ma Hongpeng said that smart cars used overseas must be applied to the local language, and in the past, the on-board speech recognition and synthesis system of foreign languages was monopolized by foreign companies, and domestic car companies could only use the voice technology of foreign companies. For example, for a long time in the past, Changan Automobile has been using foreign technology in models issued overseas for the Middle East, South America and other overseas, and safety issues are the biggest consideration.
In order to solve this card neck problem, Ma Hongpeng's team and iFLYTEK Research Institute of HKUST launched the research and development of Changan Automobile's in-vehicle foreign language speech recognition and synthesis system.
"To do on-board foreign language recognition, you not only need to understand, but also understand the language and cultural habits of other countries, and even the accents of different regions of the same language, which requires a strong recognition model and machine learning to support." Ma Hongpeng explained that the "recognition" of vehicle speech is divided into two technical levels: "speech recognition" and "semantic recognition", "speech recognition" is equivalent to human mouth and ear, responsible for expression and acquisition, and "semantic recognition" is equivalent to human brain, responsible for thinking and information processing. To this end, the team pioneered the adoption of entity extraction + dynamic templates, the framework of fusion deep learning, stripped away the speech and semantic technologies, and built a cloud + terminal multilingual semantic platform, based on which multilingual semantic understanding can be quickly realized.
In 2021, the achievements of this on-board foreign language speech recognition system have been localized, and the models issued overseas by Changan Automobile have adopted this domestic system, "the localization of key technologies is not only more stable and safe, but also reduces production costs, helping domestic independent brands to go to sea." Ma Hongpeng said.
The future: "voice + vision" to create a new experience of human-computer interaction
In recent years, Chongqing has fully implemented the strategy of manufacturing power, and accelerated the construction of a strong manufacturing city and an "intelligent manufacturing town". "As we are in the automotive industry, we are also constantly thinking about how to give full play to the advantages of artificial intelligence and empower Chongqing's automobile manufacturing to create a new pattern through 'AI + car'." Ma Hongpeng said.
With the release of new technology products, "AI + automobile" has new achievements. In March this year, Chongqing car company Auchan Auto Smart Happy Cockpit was released in Chongqing, deeply integrating artificial intelligence technology with automobile use scenarios and creating the world's first out-of-car voice interaction system. This system also comes from Ma Hongpeng's Chongqing team.
"In the past, the voice interaction of the car was in the car, in fact, the intelligent interaction outside the car was also the need of the user, and the research and development was obstructed and long under the interval of one door." For example, Ma Hongpeng said that in the past, users in the car scene, there are often difficult to open the door, difficult to move the car and other pain points, and this set of voice interaction system outside the car can allow the owner to wake up the vehicle outside the car, such as in the crowded parking lot, you can call it "drive the car out", the vehicle can automatically drive forward, shopping back to the hands are not convenient to open the door, you can also say a "open the trunk", the trunk can be automatically opened.
"Compared with the voice interaction outside the car, the difficulty lies in how to ensure that the machine can hear clearly and execute the instructions in complex environments such as noise outside the car." Ma Hongpeng said that in order to achieve human-vehicle interaction outside the car, he and his team created two technologies, the neural network noise reduction algorithm and the "cold start" system, so that the outside voice interaction system can achieve 360-degree voice noise reduction and no dead angle recognition coverage, and achieve stable and efficient voice interaction outside the car.
In the future, how to go on the road of intelligent transformation and upgrading of automobiles?
"The second half of the automotive revolution is intelligent, networked, and shared." Ma Hongpeng said that he and the team are developing new technologies for multimodal interaction, and future smart cars will increase visual induction interaction in addition to voice interaction. For example, when you look at the left window and issue an "open window" command, then the car machine will only open the left window; it is looking at the map through the central control, saying zoom in, and the car machine will enlarge the map for the user.
As an important pillar industry in Chongqing, the automobile industry gathers from the whole industrial chain such as vehicle ends, parts, batteries, and software, laying the foundation for Chongqing to overtake in the field of intelligent vehicles. Ma Hongpeng said that iFLYTEK will give full play to the advantages of artificial intelligence, further move from technology providers to infotainment systems, audio systems, etc., to the integration of soft and hard development, and help Chongqing's automotive industry intelligent manufacturing.
Upstream journalist Li Shu