Chinese tech giant Xiaomi launched its own voice-activated smart assistant dubbed XiaoAI which is installed on its smartphones and other products, including smart speakers and smart home products. Earlier this year, Lei Jun revealed that XiaoAI has been activated on a massive 100 million gadgets but that is definitely in China alone. We are yet to see the voice assistant gets adapted for its English users as well as other popular languages. That may change soon as popular speech recognition expert Daniel Povey has taken to Twitter to disclose that he will be joining Xiaomi in Beijing soon.

I am very close to signing an agreement to work for Xiaomi in Beijing. Would leave before end of 2019, and would hire a small team there to work on next-gen `PyTorch-y' Kaldi.

— Daniel Povey (@dpovey1) October 16, 2019

Daniel Povey was in the news recently for a weird reason. The John Hopkins University (JHU) associate professor attempted to end a month-long students sit-in by entering the building using a bolt cutter. He was subsequently fired by the university but immediately got employed by Facebook. The programmer later announced he was no longer joining Facebook after both parties couldn’t agree on terms.

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The AI expert also disclosed that he would be leaving for China before the end of 2019 and would recruit a small team that would assist him to work on the next-gen PyTorch Kaldi. Povey is responsible for the development of the speech recognition tool kit – Kaldi. We expect the company to seal the deal soon and develop an adaptation for now Chinese speakers for XiaoAI. It would in no small way to help Xiaomi’s posture as an internet company as more XiaoAI-powered products could get released outside China. Let’s keep our fingers crossed on this one.

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