Harman, Baidu Extend CarLife Pact With Smart Speaker, AI Technologies

Harman and Baidu announced a global partnership to deliver audio solutions to speech-enabled smart speakers enabled with Baidu’s artificial intelligence technology, at the Baidu World conference Thursday. Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal said Harman is focused on giving consumers “sophisticated functionalities, personalized user interfaces” and “seamless integration from home and work to the car and on the go.” The partnership expands on a 2015 collaboration for CarLife, which offers internet, entertainment and location-based services for the China market using Harman head units. Under the new partnership, consumers will be able to control sound and on-demand streaming services using Baidu’s speech recognition, natural language processing and speech synthesis technologies, said Baidu Chief Scientist Andrew Ng.