Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Lily: An incredible way to learn Chinese

San Francisco based Maybe, an AI company that develops voice-controlled devices and voice processing AI chipsets have developed ‘Lily’. It is the world’s first smart speaker that can teach you Chinese.

The team of Lily includes engineers having extensive experience of working with companies like Google, Samsung, Intel, and Huawei.

They said, “We‘re a team of Chinese language learners and machine learning engineers who specialize in voice processing and we’ve invented an exciting device that can teach you Chinese faster than anything on the market.”

Learning a new language is always excited but through books? It’s boring and time-consuming. But this new gadget will empower you to learn easily and fastest. It is easy to immerse yourself in the language with Lily despite your nativeness. Lily’s companion app pushes you to speak as much possible even during working.

How does it anonymously immerse you in the language?

Lily comprises interactive conversations, real-time translation, vocabulary voice games, and a Chinese voice assistant. Interactive conversations allow you to practice your speech by having conversations with Lily. It uses speech recognition and voice synthesis to understand things and reply with a human voice. No need to memorize any repeated dialogues, Lily understands real interactive conversations.

Chinese voice assistant answer queries in Chinese. Such as time, weather, ordering food, seeing a doctor, introducing yourself, stories and many more.

Similarly, real-time translation enables you to get translations promptly. You can search your translations and review them through the companion mobile app. Vocabulary voice games let you learn vocabs with voice games instead of translations. You can store and delete this data whenever you want.

A team explained vocabulary learning, “Learning vocabulary is tedious due to having to memorize long vocabulary lists. We’re changing all of this. Our voice games help you actively learn vocabulary, with oral questions and animations making the whole learning process fun and sticky.”

They built this mobile app with several games such as family members voice game, colors game, numbers game, cities voice game, countries voice game, animals voice game, sports voice game, and many more.

Lily’s companion app allows you to see your conversations in Pinyin and Chinese and learn characters. This app also detects your pronunciation errors and correct them. It also helps you to prepare for the Chinese exam.

Lily Learning Level
Lily Learning Level

It is built with training programs to prepare for HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test) to study/work in China. Likewise, it is designed for any skill level from beginner to advanced level. However, you can personalize your curriculum.

They explained about this training program, “In collaboration with professional Chinese tutors, we’ve developed easy to understand training programs so that you can reach a target Chinese level in 3, 6 or 12 months. We have a well- designed curriculum with regular exercises and a progress tracking system.”

Lily's audio architecture
Lily’s audio architecture

This smart speaker offers high-quality sound, beautiful design, and intuitive touch control. Lily is designed with own AI for more privacy.

“Good quality sound begins with great driver design; a custom designed long-throw woofer for rich vocals, deep bass, dynamic range, and a full-size edge-driven tweeter to deliver the high-fidelity audio resolution that you would find in a high-end home speaker. The drivers are managed by a perfectly tuned 30W high-power class D amplifier.”

This amazing sound quality now you can enjoy from all the directions, “True 360-degree by 100-degrees listening window”.

Lily's Voice AI
Lily’s Voice AI

“We’ve engineered 3 voice-controlled speakers with some of the biggest Internet companies in the world and developed the voice AI to power them.”

Lily’s intuitive touch enables you to control volume, change songs, and mute the microphone. Below are the other controls;

Lily touch controls
Lily’s touch controls

Lily is wrapped in a smooth knit fabric with both a beautiful texture and a strong permeability to sound. It is the most advanced language learning tool in the world. Maybe, AI company has designed Lily with voice AI and its own language learning content. Hence, it stands out to be a smarter language learning tool than any other on the market.

“We engineered a low stitch density fabric so that its intermeshing loops can be elastic and stretch during assembly into large “holes” to better let the sound pass through.”

Inside Lilly's head
Inside Lilly’s head
  • Dimensions: 160mm diameter, 103mm*255mm
  • Weigh: 1.7 kg
  • Wi-Fi: 802.11b/g/n/ac (2.4 GHz/5 GHz)
  • Bluetooth 5.0
  • Audio formats: HE-AAC, LC-AAC, MP3, Vorbis, WAV, FLAC
  • CPU: Quad-Core Cortex-A7
  • Power: 18V, 2A
  • Port: DC power jack

This Chinese voice assistant makes you feel like home in a Chinese language environment. To better understand the Chinese language and so the culture you just have to use the voice assistant. Learn time and date, weather, alarm, music and lyrics, everything in Chinese.

For teaching Chinese, they said, “We had to develop specific voice AI technology that can’t be found in usual voice-controlled devices, whether it’s being able to understand people speaking Chinese with a strong accent, or synthesizing a voice that can speak both English and Chinese fluently.”