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by Stephanie Sim, Computerworld Hong Kong

HONG KONG (IDG) -- The evolution of Chinese-language information technology seems to be moving at a pace surpassing that of any other non-Western language. While common Chinese computing practices like keyboard input methods are still widely used, they may soon be passe as new alternatives like voice-recognition devices gain popularity in the Chinese-language world.

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The rapid growth in the development and marketing of Chinese technology products isn’t surprising. Reaching the world’s largest consumer market is clearly reason enough for IT companies around the world to develop and adapt products to gain a piece of the Chinese pie.

It’s difficult to imagine, but it was only 10 years ago that any semblance of a Chinese operating system was developed specifically for the Chinese market.

“The first [Chinese] OS was developed in 1989. It was a direction passed down from the government in the early ‘80s and executed by people in the universities, including industry professionals and research centers,” said Fanny Chan, Compaq Computer’s Unix program director in Greater China. “But the project had only the scientific components without the market in mind. The OS was unable to incorporate international hardware or middleware, making it difficult to develop local software for it.”

“Since everything was done behind closed doors, no one from the outside could be involved. What was lacking was the support for the OS to be fully operational,” Chan explained. “Over the years, they understood that this was a problem and so they looked for the solution. They realized that if the OS is not linked to the outside world, it will lack the market touch to bring it to the next level.”

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Opting for pragmatism

As a result, foreign companies were invited to develop local technologies, which could work hand-in-hand with international standards, Compaq’s Chan noted. “Today, the Chinese have developed a new trend in thinking and dealing with IT strategy,” she said. “They use a three-step system which brings in technology, digests and absorbs the technology, before adding value to it and developing its own technology.”

This three-step pragmatism is especially apparent in the Mainland’s dealing with Chinese computing. Chan explained that the Chinese, in joint undertakings with foreign firms, have allowed themselves to work in a “white box” scenario, which means working in a transparent system where everything is known. This allows researches to develop products and technologies unique to the Chinese market, she added. “They can build firewalls, security packets, and encryption for local needs. At the same time, customers can mix local and non-local products because they are compatible.”

Farsighted entrepreneurs have recognized the growth potential and in turn come up with products to tap the PRC market. Beijing-based Chinese-language software vendor Stone Rich Sight Information Technology, the developers of RichWin, a Chinese shell program for Windows, targets mainly users in China, and is extremely successful.

Also successful is Culturecom Group, a Hong Kong-based publishing firm, which changed its business focus to include cultural and information technology products. According to Culturecom’s chairman, Cheung Wai Tong, “the publishing market was suffering from severe competition due to the territory’s adverse economic climate …and while maintaining all existing lines of core business, [it] decided to take various steps to facilitate the injection of new capital into the Group.”

The company acquired Fighting Spirit Technology, led by Chu Bong Foo, the inventor of the “Chang Jei” Chinese input system. In the pipeline for the Group is Chinese 2000, an operating platform touted to be similar to Microsoft’s Windows, which will be released in the second half of 2000, Chu said. Jointly developed with the Software Center of the Chinese Academy of Science, the platform enables computers to “think” in Chinese, so any network-connected computer will become accessible in Chinese, either via keyboard or voice, he added.

The Chinese 2000 platform includes Chinese Program Language, Chinese Windows Application System, Home Networking Control System, Chinese Cultural Database, 3D Animation Production and Play System, and a TV set-top box, Chu said.

Cheung noted that another acquisition, this time of Snow Drop Management, gave his company access to Qcode, another Chinese input system. He noted that the expertise from the two input companies was important in enabling Culturecom to launch Culturekid iShop, a network information services center in the Greater China region. The multi-functional retailing model is setting the stage for e-shopping, which is not yet widely accepted in Asia, Chu added.

Pressing need

“Although Chinese input systems have shown marked improvements in recent years, inputting Chinese remains several times slower than inputting English,” said Kai-Fu Lee, managing director of Microsoft Research in China. “This is why MSR China’s first functional objective is our work on a multi-modal user interface is Chinese input.

“We hope that new natural-language technologies, along with new keyboards and speech and handwriting recognition technologies, can be combined to form a quick and intuitive input method,” Lee said. “Our goal is to develop new technologies that will enable Chinese users to use Chinese computers with the same ease and convenience that Americans have when using English-language computers.”

Lee added that MSR China is attempting to make some bold forecasts about what the Chinese computing environment will look like in five years, and will work to set a direction accordingly. “Most of the information on the Web today is English-language text, but in five years there will be materials in many more languages and much more multimedia on the Web,” he said.

“One of our major research focus areas is the next-generation user interface,” Lee said. “Our goal is to develop new technologies that will enable people to ‘talk’ to their machines more naturally and in a greater variety of ways, so that using a computer will be similar to conversing with another person. We plan to research speech technologies, with a particular stress on improving speech technology in ways that will make it better suited to Chinese.

“We will create a large amount of speech data, and from it we hope to discover features that are specific to Chinese, including word segmentation, tone, and acoustic modeling. We will also explore ways of employing the relatively mature statistical framework of speech recognition to achieve the integration of input and output methods with multi-modal input technologies. We are convinced that these technologies will have applications to other input methods as well, including pinyin and handwriting,” Lee said.

Local flavors

“We have several versions of our computer speech input products for Greater China,” said Louis Woo, L&H’s corporate senior vice president and president of its Asia-Pacific division. “For the Mandarin market, there are two versions, one for the Mainland and another for Taiwan. There are also different acoustic models for the different regions of China to accommodate local flavor.”

Before moving to L&H Woo co-founded AsiaWorks, a firm whose main focus was developing and marketing Asian-language speech input technology. Its aim was to eliminate the difficulties of using Chinese character keyboards. L&H acquired Asiaworks in 1998.

“We want to use more voice recognition to help people navigate through the maze of the computer,” Woo said. “Our Chinese-language product uses natural language technology to allow users to navigate, edit, and formulate any application in the Windows environment through verbal commands.

“And while we use a lot of statistical models to match statistically what the user is saying in order to make sure it’s as accurate as possible, it doesn’t yet invoke artificial intelligence,” he said. “In the future, the computer will be able to discern whether a person is dictating or giving a command. It will not only recognize the language, but will also be able to understand speech.”

Woo noted that speech-recognition devices break new ground in the field of Chinese language input as they eliminate the difficulty Chinese people encounter in learning a keyboard-based Chinese input method, and overcome speed barrier associated with pen-based input methods.

L&H, which recently launched a Cantonese speech input software package in Hong Kong, has attracted public recognition. “We are constantly trying to improve the accuracy of our speech recognition technology so that the product can handle any kind of daily task and become increasingly user-friendly,” Woo said.

According to K.C. Kwong, the SAR government’s Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting, there’s an insatiable demand for Chinese language and culture content in the region, which has yet to be met.

“When we talk about Internet development, we are seeing more and more people outside the English-speaking community coming onto the Internet,” he said. “You will see that the growth potential in China is quite fantastic.” He noted he had observed that many North American companies with very good multimedia content are not “Asian-centric” enough to convert their content to Asian languages, which is disadvantageous to both sides.

Catalyst for change

“Because the great majority of documents on the Web are in English, most Chinese cannot effectively search for documents they need, nor can they entirely understand the content of the documents they do find,” he said. “We plan to research multi-lingual search technologies that can extract outlines and key words from English texts, as well as translating this information into text that Chinese people can use and understand.

“Although a fully automatic high-quality computer translation is not something that can be realized in the short term, we believe that multi-lingual searching will nonetheless be a boon to all Chinese users. Most of all, I hope that the innovations described can help solve the difficult computing problems that Chinese people face today, and that these innovations may ultimately benefit the 1.3 billion people of China,” Lee said.