Eastern Group announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding for cooperation with ASUS Intelligent Cloud Services (AICS) on the 16th to jointly develop retail AI technology. Eastern revealed that it will collaborate with ASUS on three major technologies, including phone voice recognition data mining, ETtoday Pets store image recognition, and membership data processing for users.

Recognize and understand the Taiwanese accent! ASUS’ Da Vinci Lab (intellection) previously won second place for voice recognition in the Ministry of Science and Technology’s “Formosa Speech Recognition Grand Challenge.” Now ASUS’ AI voice technology has advanced even further and they have also announced that they will be collaborating with Eastern to introduce this technology for commercial applications. (Further reading: Helping AI Understand Human’s “Reading Between the Lines”! ASUS to Recruit Software Experts for Elite System)

Consumers who watch TV shopping fall under an older age group, with 90,000 incoming and outgoing calls from members every day according to Eastern. ETMall converts these 90,000 voice calls per day to text while ASUS AI can improve voice to text accuracy. The telemarketing center of ETMall, a subsidiary of Eastern Group, has 9 million members in Taiwan and handles an average of 90,000 calls per day. Big data technology was introduced in 2014 to tag members and summarize customer habits in the hope of understanding users’ characteristics. After the introduction of big data analysis, the rate of calls answered by the telemarketing center during holidays has increased from 47% to 61%. In the future, it is expected that the introduction of ASUS voice recognition technology will further improve the quality of member services and online to offline (O2O) customer orientation.

Vincent Hung, Assistant Manager of Eastern Group, said that the telemarketing center has 1,500 employees. In addition to receiving calls from members every day to place orders and inquire about shopping information, the telemarketing center also proactively calls members to recommend suitable products, with a total of 90,000 calls made and received every day. In the past, when the telemarketing center called members on holidays to promote their products, the low answer rate had always been a pain point. It is also a major challenge for the Group to convert the voice data of 90,000 calls into text every day to start data mining. This kind of voice to text data contains a lot of transaction information and is extremely valuable. In the past, when we worked with a number of Chinese manufacturers, the accuracy of text conversion was only 85%, but we hope to raise it through ASUS’ advanced AI technology solutions.

Huang Tai-Yi, ASUS Global CVP and CTO, mentioned that through this cooperation, ASUS will provide advanced AI core technology to help give Eastern the drive to gain consumer insight, service optimization, and business opportunity development.

ETtoday Pets, a subsidiary of Eastern Group, has 91 stores in Taiwan. It is hoped that the resources of ASUS can be used to build a store foot traffic monitoring system to analyze information such as visitor’s gender and visit time. Thirdly, we hope to integrate online media and users’ shopping footprints, as well as offline physical store traffic and product information analysis to establish a “One ID” database. This will allow members under different accounts to be categorized, helping the company to compile more specific consumers’ profiles. Eastern Group’s President, Gary Wang, pointed out: “Digital cloud is a challenge and an opportunity for media channels; moreover, 5G, AI, and AR will change consumers’ lifestyles. The Group chose to become a partner with ASUS in the hopes that ASUS’ expertise in the AI field can be leveraged to improve big data technology. We hope to fully integrate the soft power and hardware, so that Eastern and ASUS can join hands to create an international cooperation and exchange platform.”

Huang Tai-Yi, ASUS Global CVP and CTO, and Head of ASUS Intelligent Cloud Services, mentioned that ASUS will provide assistance to Eastern Group to build the internal data center of the enterprise. Through advanced AI core technologies such as computer vision (CV), automated speech recognition (ASR), and natural language processing (NLP), it will aggregate and structurally transform the massive amount of data of various business entities, which will enable point data to realize the potential of e-commerce, and form a substantial and practical data gold mine.