Ah yeah, well… At least in America, the marketing gap is pretty wide I think! (mostly based around LLMs)

Our “AI” courseware was pretty basic outside of the facial recognition (which I found impressive, if not TOO useful). It would keep track of student responses and tailor some questions based on previous performance, but that’s pretty basic (I think it would have been better if our content developers knew how to work with the software)

About the marketing, we were actually a multimedia educational materials maker. Textbooks, courseware, video series , etc etc

The founder/CEO liked to pretend we were a tech company, but our bread and butter was VIPKids-style English lessons and textbook series with long shelf life. (I often felt like he was cosplaying as Jack Ma, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, if you know what I mean)

I have no good references that aren’t boring propaganda from state media… Search China Daily for stories about ed tech

Or more broadly, search for “Ed tech” or “educational technology”

I think our “AI” was mostly BS, but I guess it had its niche.

Oh that reminds me… When I worked at state media, we ran stories about AI facial recognition at the winter Olympics. The stories claimed that they could identify more than 99 percent of people wearing COVID masks (I suspect this may be an exaggeration, as airport immigration officials and train station officials would make people remove masks and smile for cameras)

Also, just remembered: During my time at state media, I recall reading some Xi Jinping quote along the lines of “Whoever has the best AI will control the future”

My company in China added AI to its products basically to receive government subsidies.

They introduced it into courseware to track student faces and tell parents whether kids were enjoying lessons, paying attention, etc etc. It was weird to see in action. I used the software and acted like a “bad student” to see what it would say about my face and lack of attention.

I’m also a voice actor. They tried to replace me with AI voices but the voices in 2021 were stuck in the uncanny valley and clients complained.

The company pretty much went belly-up when Beijing introduced the Double Reduction policy. I wonder what became of the their software? And I wonder if they ever made an AI version of my voice