It has been known that Chinese search engine giant Baidu has been preparing to launch a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT service for a while. And now these preparations seem to have paid off.
The new service, called ERNIE Bot, is the latest version of the ERNIE (Advanced Representation Through Information Integration) bot that the company has developed over the past decade and was first released in 2019. At a press conference, Baidu CEO Robin Li claims that this version of ERNIE Bot has special abilities, a capacity close to GPT-4.
It seems that much of ERNIE Bot’s know-how is focused on the Chinese market. So while it can sort out Chinese idioms for you, it may not be able to answer many questions for certain topics outside the region. ERNIE Bot is capable of giving voice responses to a user in different Chinese dialects and can also generate images and videos from Chinese texts.
During its demo at the event, the chatbot was able to summarize a Chinese science fiction novel and make suggestions on how to continue writing the book if it is to be expanded. He was also able to name the actors in the movie adaptation, compare their heights, and conclude who was taller between the two. In another demo, he could suggest names for a high-tech services company serving small and medium-sized businesses, write slogans for it, and even create a newsletter with a specific word count.
Li said 650 companies have signed up to use ERNIE Bot’s technology, but he also acknowledged that it’s not ready to go public. Baidu seems to admit that it announced the ERNIE Bot a little early due to market demand brought on by ChatGPT’s spike in popularity. For now, the Chinese tech giant will only grant access to those who have already received invitations, but more companies can apply for the ability to embed chatbots into their products via Baidu’s cloud platform.
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