2017 China Internet Conference welcomed by public

Intelligent vehicles, virtual reality and artificial intelligence proved to be the showstoppers at the 2017 China Internet Conference, which held its "public open day" in Beijing on Thursday.

2017 China Internet Conference is held in Beijing between July 11 and 13. [Photo: Xinhua]

As CRI's Wu Yifan discovered, there were plenty of ways for visitors to get to grips with cool new technology.

The focus for this year's event was science and technology with an emphasis on interaction and demonstration.

In the product experience zone, a contender for the title of the world's fastest electric car – the NIO EP9 - attracted a lot of attention.

Pu Yang, who works for the Shanghai-based electric vehicle startup Nio, outlined the intelligent features of the vehicle:

"For example, if you're going from Beijing to Tianjin, but your car has only 20% battery left. Then you can input the info into your calendar via smartphone, and our car will calculate a route that is the fastest for you to take, it can automatically calculate the location of the charging station and the duration of the charging, and it can even make a reservation for you in advance. This approach can help minimize the difficulties people face with new energy vehicles during long journeys."

Experts hold seminars during the 2017 China Internet Conference. [Photo: Xinhua]

The firm is planning to release the vehicle officially within the year, following breakthroughs in intelligence, light weight design, energy management and cost optimization.

In addition to intelligent manufacturing, intelligent robot related services also proved a big draw with audiences.

China Mobile's speech intelligence project allows machines to understand the language of the user, so that they can be applied to customer service hotlines.

The CEO of the speech intelligence project, Zhong Faqiang says it's already been piloted in Zhejiang.

"We do speech search, speech recognition and speech emotion recognition and synthesis. All the mental activities of a person are reflected in his or her emotions, and at the same time one speaks with stress, which defines what people care about most. And these things have internal logic, which can tell what the real need is by reasoning," Zhong said.

Applications for virtual reality and augmented reality technology have become the Holy Grail of the internet both at home and abroad.

China Telecom demonstrated its "smart home" service, which will help consumers understand its products in a more intuitive way.

The operations manager of China Telecom online service division is Wei Yuan.

"This is what we pioneered, integrated virtual reality and augmented reality technology in order to create a smart home. We set up a virtual model room and, armed with VR glasses, users can gain a better understanding of our products and services," Wei noted.

Also, this year at the China Internet Conference, a special "Entrepreneurship Street", which provided both grassroots entrepreneurs and start-ups free exposure, and also gave small and medium sized enterprises a platform for the release of information about their products.