A robot that can speak many languages, do translation work and conduct interviews made a stunning debut at the tenth annual meeting of China's electronic information technology, held in Beijing on April 19, 2015.

The robot, named "Xiaodu", helped the host interview foreign guests. Its accurate, fast and fluent translation surprised all the attendees.

Baidu's leading translation technology has perfectly combined machine translation and speech recognition, thus endowing Xiaodu with powerful multilingual translation skills.

The “Big-data based core technology and industrialization of Internet machine translation” project, developed by Baidu, the Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang University, Harbin Institute of Technology, the Institute of Computing Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tsinghua University, won the first prize for progress in science and technology at the event.

The project represents a huge breakthrough in mass translation knowledge acquisition, translation models, and multilingual translation technology, and has won high praise from many well-known global scholars in artificial intelligence and the computer translation field.

The achievements of this award-winning project will be applied to "Baidu translation" and more than 7000 companies and third-party applications, which will further stimulate and promote the development of related industries.

This article was edited and translated from 《百度推出全球首个多语翻译机器人》, source: Science and Technology Daily.