Midea Officially Launches Its Smart New Retail AI Platform Promising an All-New AI-Enhanced Shopping Experience

SHANGHAI, March 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The much-anticipated Appliance & Electronics World Expo (AWE) opened its doors in Shanghai with great fanfare recently. Midea group has proudly presented at the expo its brand-new "Smart New Retail" AI platform, which promises a new and enhanced shopping experience.

The Smart New Retail by Midea is an AI-enabled platform which boasts an unprecedented and enhanced experience for consumers. The system's virtual AI sales guide has fully integrated a variety of cutting edge AI developments and also offers a smart virtual product experience and smart payment options working together to provide a more convenient, highly individualized and customized shopping experience.

Midea's New Retail sales guide integrates four areas of the latest AI technological developments: a highly sophisticated and accurate voice AI assistant with natural language processing, so the AI sales guide can have one to one intimate conversation with customers and acquire first-hand information about their needs, wants, and shopping preferences; facial recognition with gender, age, and fashion style, as well as the ability to identify 107 expressions in a human face to establish real-time baseline understanding of each consumer, based on the feedback from their dialog and on specific products, as well as individual time spent in browsing products in retail shop; big-data integration of past purchase history, service records to build a comprehensive user persona, along with the acquired voice and facial AI data; last and the most important, hundreds or thousands of AI models are built and ensembled together to pinpoint a consumer's shopping needs, based on their habits and preferences. Highly individualized suggestions and recommendations for products and product bundles with targeted discounts and deals are generated. During this fully digitized shopping cycle, consumers can also better understand details about certain products, easily make product comparisons with a quick voice prompt, and get an idea of Midea's full range of product offerings and how they can be mixed and matched to suit all home décor styles.

Midea's Smart New Retail Platform will not only support its own 2,000 plus flagship stores, and hundreds of thousands of franchise stores but also support other e-commerce distribution channels, the Midea Yimai online platform and Midea's own official website. The system will use AI technologies to provide individualized suggestions and recommendations with pinpoint accuracy based on upgraded customer need analyses. It's believed that the system can read consumers better than they can themselves and that it will become an indispensable element of their future shopping experience. It is also destined to set benchmarks for future shopping scenarios.

Although Midea's Global AI team has only been operating for one and a half years, it already has a long list of accomplishments, including establishing the Midea heterogeneous GPU/CPU deep learning AI platform, compiling a comprehensive database for Chinese dishes, developing multiple smart products and applications, including an AI-enabled smart oven, a smart rice cooker, a Smart Kitchen (capable of understanding natural human speech), AI industrial applications and AI applications in the area of deep learning exterior inspection.

Dr. Dongyan Wang, who is the leader of Midea Group's Global AI Team, Vice President and General Manager of the Silicon Valley Emerging Technology Center and Shenzhen Artificial Intelligence Institute, says that, " Midea Smart New Retail is not motivated to be a store with cashiers. Instead, it has gone far beyond the simple 'online + offline' concept, and focuses on establishing a customer centric and AI driven platform that promises an all-new, convenient and efficient shopping experience to value-seeking customers. From the customers' perspective, the system allows them to quickly locate their favorite products using voice, based on comprehensive AI assisted customer needs analytics, and user benefits analyses. The system can receive and process real-time voice, chat, and facial feedback from customers and provide highly individualized valuable quality shopping assistance to shoppers. By allowing Midea to fully understand a customer's wants and needs, and allowing them to better understand Midea products, the system is destined to elevate human/machine interaction to a new level."

As a multinational, hi-tech oriented corporation with its core businesses spanning four areas: home appliances, HVAC products, robotics and automation, and smart supply chain management(logistics), Midea Group is committed to further developing cutting edge technologies. Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and big data, Midea is dedicated to providing an all-new shopping experience, featuring more engaging and individualized shopping scenarios with a higher level of Human Machine Interface (HMI), which is a demonstration of Midea's unswerving commitment to the direction of the future of new retail. The AI team of Midea will continue its relentless pursuit in applying AI technologies and big data technologies in real-life shopping scenarios, and transforming the relationship between human and machines. Midea will usher in a new era of human-machine collaboration, where human and machine interface will reach far and deep into a new level of harmony.

SOURCE Midea Group