Baidu Signs Partnership Deal With HARMAN; To Open Source Software Platform

(RTTNews) - Baidu Inc. (BIDU), a Chinese language Internet search provider, announced Thursday a global partnership with HARMAN International Industries, Inc. (HAR), a connected technologies company for automotive, consumer and enterprise markets.

Through this partnership, HARMAN will deliver high-quality audio solutions to innovative speech-enabled smart speakers, integrated with Baidu's advanced Artificial Intelligence technology.

Andrew Ng, chief scientist of Baidu, said, "The partnership between Baidu and HARMAN will let consumers use natural voice control to experience premium quality sound and on-demand services. HARMAN will integrate a range of AI technologies from Baidu, including speech recognition, natural language processing and speech synthesis."

In January 2015, HARMAN Connected Car and Baidu entered into a strategic collaboration to launch CarLife, a vehicle networking solution.

Separately, Baidu announced that it will release an open source software platform for the deep learning community. The software will be released on GitHub on September 30 with full documentation and specs. A pre-release alpha version is available now.

Originally developed for internal use by and for Baidu's own engineers, the platform, codenamed "PaddlePaddle, provides an intuitive and powerful interface for data handling and specifying model structure.