Xueersi Online School under Gaotu Techedu Participated in the 2019 Beijing Fair

Xueersi Online School's booth at the Beijing Fair showcased their independently developed "AI Teacher Language Learning System" and other artificial intelligence products

Visitors experienced the Xueersi Online School's "AI Teacher Intelligent Correction" system, where users only need to take a photo of the question with their phone, and the system can recognize handwriting and provide real-time correction

On May 28th, 2019, the China International Fair for Trade in Services (referred to as the "Beijing Fair") officially opened in Beijing. Xueersi Online School, a subsidiary of Gaotu Techedu, showcased its independently developed "AI Teacher" and other products. Three products from Gaotu Techedu's intelligent education system, "Smart Classroom with Paper and Pen", "Future Cloud Platform", and others also participated in the Changping venue of the Beijing Fair.

At the fair, AI Teacher demonstrated how artificial intelligence achieves "accurate poverty alleviation" in education. As the latest scientific research result of Xueersi Online School, AI Teacher deeply integrates technologies such as facial expression recognition, speech recognition and evaluation, and OCR handwriting recognition. Xueersi Online School also applied this to educational philanthropy, delivering high-quality educational resources to remote and impoverished areas. This won unanimous praise from domestic and foreign guests attending the fair.
 

Xueersi Online School Develops AI Teacher  Artificial Intelligence Aids in Chinese Language Learning

At the exhibition, Bai Yunfeng, the President of Gaotu Techedu, introduced guests to the basic overview, mission, and vision of Gaotu Techedu, and accompanied the guests to experience the "Dual-Teacher Classroom" of the Hillsmile Foundation.

The Hillsmile Foundation, established in 2017 with a donation of 100 million RMB by New Oriental Education and Gaotu Techedu, integrates the advantageous resources of both sides to create an open educational philanthropy platform and is committed to promoting educational equity through technology.

In recent years, the nation has prioritized education-based poverty alleviation as a crucial solution for poverty reduction. Internet + artificial intelligence has created a new face for targeted poverty alleviation in Chinese education.

"We firmly believe that the integration of technology and education will fundamentally promote the solution to poverty in our country," said Bai Yunfeng. As a technology education company, Gaotu Techedu has provided effective means and methods to solve the education problem, and together with China, has embarked on a new era of information-based basic education.

At this year's Beijing Fair, AI Teacher, a self-developed artificial intelligence system by Xueersi Online School, received widespread attention for its outstanding performance in educational poverty alleviation.

AI Teacher includes AI Teacher Language Learning System, AI Teacher one-on-one English, AI Teacher Intelligent Correction, and VR Teaching Experience. Its basic functions include facial expression recognition, speech recognition and evaluation, OCR image recognition technology, and more. With these technologies, AI Teacher can recognize students' focus, internal emotions, as well as intelligently evaluate and correct pronunciation, handwriting, meaning, and semantic performance. With the support of this series of artificial intelligence technologies, AI Teacher has provided great room for imagination in future education.

Zhaojue County, Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province, is the largest Yi ethnic minority populated county in China and a key national poverty alleviation county. 98.1% of the population are Yi ethnic minority, with a very low proficiency in Mandarin. In Liangshan Prefecture, 49% of the 540,000 preschool children do not speak Mandarin, making Mandarin education one of the most challenging tasks in the area.

In response to the national call for educational poverty alleviation, in September last year, Xueersi Online School launched the "AI Teacher Smart Education" basic education project for all in-school students in Zhaojue County, providing free Mandarin teaching services and high-quality course resources. The most commonly used words are displayed in a "Picture + Bilingual Yi-Han Pronunciation" mode.

During learning, AI Teacher displays the picture, reads in Yi language, clarifies the meaning for Yi children, and then reads in Mandarin, followed by the children reading in Mandarin. The system can perform real-time evaluation and correction of children's Mandarin pronunciation and can facilitate learning in aspects such as Mandarin phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar.

"It's like hiring a teacher who can speak standard Mandarin for the children," said Ms. Xie, a health educator in Beijing, after hearing a live demonstration and experiencing AI Teacher on-site at the Beijing Fair on the 28th, stating that if such a product could be widely promoted, it would be very convenient for minority children to learn Mandarin.

The AI Teacher Language Learning System has been used in 71 schools, 124 teaching points, and nearly 60,000 in-school students in Zhaojue County, Sichuan Province. The dreams of Yi children to "learn Mandarin and leave the mountains" have become a reality.

The AI Teacher Language Learning System can also help foreign friends who need to learn Mandarin. Xueersi Online School has successively developed multi-language teaching functions such as Russian, French, Czech, etc., to help friends from countries along the "Belt and Road" learn Mandarin. At the "China-Central and Eastern European Countries Education Cooperation and Exchange Exhibition" held in Croatia in April this year, "Antong," a high school student in Croatia, who had never studied Mandarin, accurately mastered basic Mandarin expressions in just 5 minutes and was very surprised.

Xueersi Online School hopes that the AI Teacher Language Learning System can become an effective tool for friends from countries along the "Belt and Road" to learn Mandarin, thereby promoting Chinese language and cultural exchanges and communication internationally.
 

Gaotu Techedu Strengthens "AI + Education" to Promote Educational Equity and Inclusion

For Gaotu Techedu, whose mission is to "promote educational progress through technology," AI Teacher is just one of the many new "AI + education" products under its umbrella.

At the recent International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Education held in China in collaboration with UNESCO, Gaotu Techedu exhibited the latest "AI + Education" products such as the "WISROOM Xueersi Smart Classroom Solution", "Xueersi Online School AI Teacher", "Smart Classroom with Paper and Pen", and received praise from attendees.

WISROOM is a smart classroom solution developed by Gaotu Techedu, empowered by AI and complemented by achievements in neuroscience research, providing personalized attention and interaction for every student.

In areas such as the "Internet + Education" demonstration zone in Ningxia, Gaotu Techedu uses the WISROOM teaching system to implement AI foreign teachers' lectures, addressing issues of insufficient foreign language teachers and inaccurate pronunciation.

Over the past year, Gaotu Techedu has utilized methods such as dual-teacher live broadcasting and AI teachers to benefit 14,000 students and 4,000 teachers in 8 impoverished counties in 4 provinces. This not only enables children in the mountains to enjoy high-quality educational resources and services similar to first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but also provides their teachers with remote teaching research and guidance, fundamentally solving the problem of unequal educational resources.

In 2018, Gaotu Techedu collaborated with the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission to pilot at the Central Elementary School in Luwan, Shanghai. Using paper-and-pen classroom tools, they tracked student behavioral trajectories, accurately recording student behavior. Based on the data, not only could they understand what students had mastered in real time and how well they had mastered it, but they could also discover the students' inclinations and weaknesses, helping them discover their potential and laying a solid foundation for the large-scale implementation of personalized teaching based on individual differences. Using data to advance education tailored to individual needs is the direction of education development.

At the same time, Gaotu Techedu hopes to use science and technology to provide large-scale, low-cost, high-quality educational services, truly advancing educational equity and inclusion, and benefiting more people.

At this year's Beijing Fair, Gaotu Techedu's inclusive interactive learning brand "Xueersi Light Classroom" and Baidu's conversational artificial intelligence operating system "Xiao Du Assistant" signed a contract. In the future, the two parties will collaborate on technologies and business to facilitate semantic understanding, multilingual voice interaction, child voice recognition, image recognition, and more.

It is worth mentioning that in addition to Xueersi Online School and the Hillsmile Foundation participating in the Beijing Fair, Gaotu Techedu's intelligent education division also brought three products — "Smart Classroom with Paper and Pen," "AI Teacher" assisting with high-quality teaching staff, and "Future Cloud Platform" which drives data-driven personalized learning — to the Changping venue of the Beijing Fair.

Regarding Gaotu Techedu's participation in the Beijing Fair, Bai Yunfeng stated that the reasonable application of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet, and big data not only helps achieve inclusive education and promote balanced educational development, but also promotes educational transformation, enabling Chinese education to connect with the world and the future.

"Under the new era background of 'AI + education,' Gaotu Techedu hopes to explore the application of technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data in education, to actively contribute to the provision of equitable and quality education for more people," Bai Yunfeng said.

Driven by the mission of "promoting educational progress through technology," Gaotu Techedu Education Group will further explore new models of "AI + education" and address the long-standing contradictions of "scalability" and "personalization," promoting modern and balanced education development.