Alibaba acquires sound firm

Source: Xinhua | 2018-05-04

ALIBABA said it has acquired Beijing Sound Connect Technology Co to strengthen its sound recognition and human-machine interactive technologies.

Founder Fu Qiang of Sound Connect and four other team members will join Alibaba and establish two acoustics labs that enable machines to detect human speech in complicated conditions.

Fu and his team will help beef up the e-commerce giant’s audio signal processing technologies and push forward the integration of existing technologies to be applied under various circumstances, such as smart home furniture. They will also be working on the Internet of Things technologies and hardware and software solutions.

Fu, a former researcher at the Institute of Acoustics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been conducting research on speech signal processing, especially in the microphone array and machine learning based noise reduction sector.