This is part of our China's 2015 Year in Review series. For more on 2015 Tech in review, read our list of biggest moments in tech here.
Long-term Beijing resident, co-host of the Sinica podcast and all-round China tech connoisseur, Kaiser Kuo sums up the year in a collection of pleasing soundbites.
What was the farthest-reaching thing to happen in the China tech world this year?
I’d say it was the wave of consolidations in the Internet sector: Didi and Kuaidi early in the year, Ganji and 58.com in the spring, Meituan and Dianping, Alibaba buying Youku-Tudou, and Baidu’s share-swap that gave Ctrip a sizable stake in Qunar. Taken together these most certainly represent a significant change in the overall competitive scene.
What was the best breakthrough technology of 2015?
This year saw a lot of breakthroughs in speech recognition technology, including Baidu’s Deep Speech tech applied to Mandarin Chinese. It’s astonishingly accurate, and is going to be a real game-changer: You’ll be able to do voice commands in very natural language soon for a huge range of applications. This is going to make networked devices much more accessible and easy-to-use for ordinary people. This will be up there among the big interface advances, alongside the mouse and the touch screen.
Was there a tech story in China that caught your eye?
I can’t put a date to it, or a particular event. But this year I felt like everyone watching the tech scene in China felt that it was the year when mobile Internet in China had actually surpassed the US in meaningful ways. Many of the companies who are active in this space and started off as PC-centric were, by the end of the year, clearly mobile-first. Mobile is making up over 50 percent of their traffic, or even their revenues. And we all started realizing how much better than WhatsApp WeChat actually is, and how much stuff you can do with Baidu Maps.
What are your predictions and expectations for 2016?
We’re going to see AI make gigantic strides in 2016 in areas like computer vision, machine translation, speech recognition and speech synthesis. While AI didn’t touch the lives of the majority of Chinese web users in 2015, it certainly will in 2016 – though it will do so in ways that aren’t obvious to most people. Tech companies are going to move even more meaningfully – and aggressively – into traditional industries like healthcare, finance and education. And we’re finally going to see a Chinese tech company make waves in an international market – something that has yet to really happen.
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