Former Facebook Technical Engineer Jiakai Liu Joins Baidu’s Xiaodu Technology

Xiaodu Technology, an offshoot of Chinese electronics giant Baidu, has ushered in a key personnel change. Jiakai Liu, the former Facebook ace technician, has officially joined the company as its outstanding R&D architect, reporting directly to Jing Kun (Eric), the company’s CEO.

Public information suggests that Liu is in the top 1% of veteran technical engineers at Facebook. Since joining in 2009, he participated in and led the development of several products and the construction of many technical frameworks from scratch. He also experienced the development process of Facebook from its initial stages to a platform connecting three billion users around the world, making many contributions to the improvement of the company.

Liu has designed and built the Facebook Message middle end service and helped it expand to serve more than one billion users. He has also provided support for message interaction and storage of communication apps such as Messenger. Additionally, he has participated in Facebook Home, the first R&D project of Facebook in cooperation with smartphone hardware manufacturers.

Before joining Facebook, Jiakai Liu worked for Google, where he was one of the top 50 employees for Google China, responsible for Book Search and Picasaweb, successively.

Xiaodu Technology is a provider of tech products for intelligent life services, and was originally the Smart Living Group of Baidu. It originates from Baidu‘s early exploration of intelligent voice technology. In September 2015, “Duer,” the predecessor of DuerOS, was established, and in March 2018, Baidu established its Smart Living Group. DuerOS gradually developed a conversational artificial intelligence ecosystem, then small smart hardware devices were developed, such as the DuSmart Speaker and headphones.

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Baidu‘s fourth-quarter financial report shows that in December, the total number of monthly voice interactions of small assistants reached 6.2 billion, and the number of monthly voice interactions of DuerOS’s hardware devices reached 3.7 billion released by Baidu, an increase of 66% from the same period last year. Xiaodu Technology ranked first worldwide in smart screen shipments during the third quarter, thanks to improved user experience, leading AI capabilities and independently developed computer chips.

DuerOS has been widely used in family, hotel, real estate, vehicle and portable product scenarios, among other fields. More than 400 million smart devices equipped with DuerOS have now been enabled. Xiaodu Technology has more than 500 well-known enterprises as cooperative partners and is available in 200,000 hotel rooms.