Hi backers,
We’ll be sharing about the progress we made during the past month. It was a strange month because instead of having a festive Chinese new year, we had the Coronavirus outbreak.
The Coronavirus situation from the inside.
The official Chinese new year holidays was from Jan 23 to Feb 1 but the government extended the holidays to Feb 10 to contain the virus. If you tried to go back to the office before that date, a guard would block you. As of now, less than 50% people are back to work nationally.
Life in Shenzhen is on standstill. Places which were full of people are now empty, shopping malls are closed, 90% of the restaurants are closed, 100% of the stadiums/theaters/KTVs are closed. Only a few groceries are open. You must wear a face mask outside or you might get fined. We’re being checked for body temperature with a temperature gun at the entrance of every shop.
When you go back home, you need to show a residence card to prove that you live here. No friends allowed to go to your place. In some severely touched cities, it’s more drastic. Two of our employees can’t make it back to Shenzhen, they’re quarantined in their city (roads, train stations, airports closed), they’re even quarantined in their home: no one is allowed to leave home! They order groceries online which are delivered to their building, the building manager puts the groceries in front of their door, they open the door for a few seconds; after eating, they put the garbage in front of the door, the building manager picks it up.
Our 3 interns are not allowed to come back to work either. Their school are closed till further notice, internships should be halted temporarily. For the rest of the team, we need to stay in quarantine for 14 days after we get back to Shenzhen to go back to work safely. If one employee gets the virus, the whole building gets shutdown. If one worker at the factory gets the virus, the whole factory has to stop operations and go in quarantine.
We tried to get back to the office but we were obligated to wear a face mask the whole day. Half of the team got headaches after wearing a mask for 2 hours. Companies must provide new face masks to every employee every day, we must prove that the company has stocks of face masks to get an official license to re-open the office (20 persons company = 20 * 5 masks/week).
But we understand the situation and the city is doing a good job. Those measures have been successful and the virus has started to decrease. Total number of cases in Shenzhen: 417, but only 1 new case during the past 5 days and only 3 deaths since the start of the outbreak.
To be able to keep pace with Lily’s product development, we’ve decided to go full remote and work from home. We’ve been back to work since February 3.
We hope that you backers are safe from the coronavirus and that it will never get to your city.
Hardware status.
All our hardware suppliers have been affected severely by the virus. They are very afraid of a spread of the disease at the work place. All the workers sleep in dormitories and are confined together. If one worker gets sick, with the quarantine and operational shutdown that would be imposed upon them, the factory would lose a month of work. So they are very careful.
Our factory only re-opened on February 16, our injection molding supplier and loudspeaker supplier re-opened on February 23 and they all only opened partially (around 30% of the workforce). Our other suppliers are not opened yet: glass panel supplier, fabric supplier, rubber supplier, etc…
We’ve solved last month PCBA’s problem, it was a small layout problem associated to our touch panel but it was very hard to debug. We’ve soldered new components directly on the board to manually test our workaround solution. During this past week, we went to our main factory and to our SMT factory for more tests and to prepare a new batch of PCBAs that will work. Here some pictures (notice the compulsory face masks):
We should be able to finish the development and debug of Lily’s hardware within 45 days, PCBA included.
However our whole supply chain is broken, we’ve only sourced the main components of Lily, not all of them (for ex, we sourced 6000 microphones but only 100 glass panels so far). Most of the hardware orders are 2 months late (even Apple/Foxconn). The factories and suppliers won’t be at full capacity until April earliest and they will be rushing to fulfill late orders from big companies, not from startups.
Due to those hardware and supply delays, which are out of our control, we are assessing that we’ll start shipping in June and we should be able to ship all the Lilys within 3.5 months.
Hopefully, we’ll ship with a more refined version of Lily’s software by then.
Recording wake words at scale.
We asked for help with our wake word recording in our last update. Thanks to all the backers who sent us samples, we’ve received more than 100 of them. It’s a little gesture but it encourages us more than you think.
We’re scaling this. Between Feb 20 and March 31, we will record more than 50000 wake word samples. We’ve already recorded 6000. This is how a recording looks like:
As you can see, we’re recording multiple words: Nihao Lily, Nihao Maybe and many other phonetically similar wake words so that Lily’s AI can be trained to recognize the right wake words from the false ones.
In reality, each word is recorded many times at different angles and distances. We also segment the recording population to reflect the diversity of our backers and their different accents (60% native English though).
Lily as a Chinese assistant.
Lily is mainly a Chinese teacher: she teaches you Chinese language lessons through voice interactions. However, Lily can also act as a voice assistant, like Alexa or Google Home. The only difference is that you ask her questions in English and she will reply in Chinese (you can ask questions in Chinese too if your level is more advanced).
We’ve finalized the functionalities of Lily in Chinese assistant mode. Here are some screens of the app:
When you ask Lily a question in English, you may not understand the answer in Chinese because it’s something you haven’t learned yet. But we believe that you’ll grasp those answers after a few times and you also have the app as visual support with Pinyin and translation.
A better Pinyin translator.
Most Chinese language learners rely on Pinyin when they start learning. This is why you need an accurate Pinyin tool. If the Pinyin is wrong, you’re learning wrong Chinese.
But most Chinese translators or Pinyin converters are very inaccurate. For ex, check those simple examples where Google Translate gets the wrong Pinyin:
There are many many errors like that.
The reason of those errors comes from the multi-pronunciation Chinese characters. One character in Chinese can be pronounced differently (and have different meanings) depending on the context of the sentence. It’s like having the word “good” in English that you would pronounce “good” in one sentence and “mad” in another sentence. Check this video to understand why it’s so hard:
We use Character-to-Pinyin conversion everywhere in Lily’s teaching system (for ex: Pinyin in the companion app). During the past month, we developed a Pinyin converter that has a higher accuracy than Google Translate. This is not only a technical task, you need to have a strong understanding of the Chinese language and phonetics.
We’ve achieved a 97% accuracy rate on multi-pronunciations characters. This means that you’ll learn accurate Chinese with Lily.
We’ve also made good progress on the design of Lily’s Chinese lessons. We’ve added two advisors to our team: one Chinese teacher from 北大 Peking University (top 2 university in China with Tsinghua) and one Chinese teacher from 北语 Beijing Language and Culture University (number 1 language university in China) who are helping us better structure Lily’s curriculum. We’ll be sharing more about this in our next updates.
Thanks backers for reading this long update. It’s not an easy time but we’re keeping the cap and we will deliver a quality product to you in June.
Stay safe.
Jie and the Maybe team.
