Shanghai subway to use Alibaba voice and facial recognition systems in AI push
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
The subway system in the Chinese city of Shanghai will bring in voice and facial recognition technologies developed by e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding as it looks to make life easier for the millions of commuters on one of the longest and busiest mass-transit railway networks on the planet.
Alibaba, its affiliate Ant Financial Services Group and Shanghai Shentong Metro Group, the operator of the Shanghai Metro, said in a joint announcement on Tuesday that the Metro would install “far-field” voice recognition technology in ticket machines in all stations, as well as facial recognition systems at the entrance of stations to verify the identities of commuters.
Passengers would be able to tell their destination to ticket machines, and the machines would then recommend the best route.
“Passengers don’t even need to use any special word to activate the kiosk,” said Yan Zhijie, director of intelligent speech recognition at Alibaba’s Institute of Data and Science Technology.
Photo courtesy of Danor Shtruzman.
Source: South China Morning Post (link opens in a new window)
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