Yesterday at the 2019 TAL AI Summit, the education giant shared its recent progress in educational technology with the whole industry.
Image credit: TAL Education website
TAL Education (好未来) launched an AI open platform at the 2019 TAL AI Summit yesterday, sharing its technological progress with the whole education industry.
The platform comprises solutions of AI-aided class, AI guard, homework-correcting and question-searching. All the AI technologies of the platform have been tested and improved in TAL’s own classes.
With AI tools, teachers can save themselves much time in correcting children’s homework, English accent and so on. Also, facial recognition can analyze children’s expression, helping to improve teachers’ class design. Besides, based on data analysis, each child can get a customized portfolio of courses.
Tom Mitchell, professor of Carnegie Mellon University, said: "Education in the next ten years will be AI-driven." He also emphasized that brain science and machine learning will be significant to future education.
In 2018, TAL Education announced its open platform strategy. For now, the company has established an AI Lab which focused on the application of computer vision, voice processing, natural language processing and so on in education. According to the company’s website, the lab cooperates now with Stanford University and Tsinghua University.
New Oriental (新东方), the biggest competitor of TAL Education, has established an AI research institution called NAIR last July. In October 2018, NAIR released an AI + education product, basically having the same function as the AI-aided class of TAL.
Apart from traditional education giants, new startups like Liulishuo (流利说) have also invested a lot in AI technologies. At present, AI + education is not only a fancy word but an inevitable trend in the upgrading education industry. As Huang Yan (黄琰), CTO of TAL Education, has said,
"Besides the traditional three roles in education (teacher, child and parent), AI is becoming now the fourth role."