Welcome to iQIYI’s bi-weekly news round-up! Here you’ll find the latest news and stories from the company, from entertainment, tech to business and from local to regional. If you are interested in learning more about iQIYI, please do not hesitate to reach out to press@qiyi.com .

 (Dec. 13, 2021-Dec. 24,2021)

CONTENT

 Action!  by iQIYI Aired

Aired on Dec. 10, the iQIYI-produced variety show Action! sheds light on the creative process that underpins that making of contemporary Chinese movies. In the program, four Chinese film industry giants—director CHEN Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), screenwriter LIU Zhenyun (Cell Phone 2), actress SHU Qi (The Transporter), and producer CHEN Sicheng (Detective Chinatown)—help six young directors unlock their creative potentials as the up-and-coming filmmakers compete for an opportunity to direct an iQIYI-produced feature film. As the competition unfolds, Action! shows viewers the full process of filmmaking, which starts with writing the screenplay, casting, and seeking investment to shooting and airing.

A Scene from the Show “Action!”

On the drive behind launching the program, iQIYI Founder and CEO GONG Yu said: “Film is an important art form that engages the whole society. Combining insights from the film industry and the broad appeal of variety shows, Action! invites more people to appreciate and even participate in filmmaking.”

iQIYI Debuts Enemy Exclusively

On Dec. 16, the urban spy drama Enemy aired online exclusively on iQIYI and is broadcasted simultaneously on channel 8 of China Central Television (CCTV). Starring renowned actors GUO Jingfei and TAN Zhuo, Enemy is the first domestic spy drama to set in a modern society.

A Still of “Enemy”

The protagonists of Enemy are an ordinary-looking couple who, while pretending to be a cab driver and a teacher, are in reality spies who are stuck in China after failing their undercover missions. As the show instills a sense of “spies could be just amongst us,” it brings excitement and novelty to traditional spy dramas.

iQIYI Debuts Food Documentary Featuring Virtual Idol via Young Creators Program

A food documentary titled Xiafanjianghu – which in Chinese literally means meal world - produced by iQIYI and two partners aired on iQIYI platforms on Dec. 22. As one of the first titles released under the iQIYI Young Creators Program, the documentary is part of The Soul of a Meal series, and pushes boundaries of the genre by exploring topics on life, humanity and youth.

A promotional poster of “Xiafanjianghu”

The documentary features iQIYI’s original virtual idol “Xiaomoli”, which in Chinese means little jasmine, who introduces the delicious food presented in the film. This marks the first time a virtual idol serves as a food commentator in a documentary.
 
The documentary’s crew visited eight cities in China, capturing the authentic local food culture in each location. Using food as a link, the documentary depicts the unique spirit of cities across China and the everyday life of individuals working in those cities.
 
The iQIYI Young Creators Program was launched by iQIYI and Meilin Culture during iQIYI World Conference in May. In aim to drive market development, the program invests in and supports documentaries and young content creators.

TECHNOLOGY

iQIYI Enhances Viewing Experience with Technology

As iQIYI original series Luoyang continues to rise in popularity, more and more viewers are discovering that in addition to watching the show, they could also click on the “Qiguan”—which literally means “unique views” in Chinese—button on the left of their screens to unlock a specially designed search engine that could identify the food, locations, items, and characters they see on screen.

Qiguan feature in “Luoyang”

Launched in late 2019, Qiguan is an original feature that iQIYI rolled out, and it allows viewers to identify the information on screen with just one click. Available on iQIYI platforms across devices, the feature incorporates a variety of AI technologies including character recognition, dialogue extraction, and background music (BGM) recognition. Recording over 3.2 billion uses in 2020 alone, Qiguan reflects the great curiosity of Chinese viewers as well as their strong interest in interactive entertainment.
 
In October 2020, the China National Computer Congress (CNCC) awarded Qiguan a prize in recognition its technological services of entertainment application.

iQIYI’s Proprietary Technology Reduces Translation Time by 30%

iQIYI announced on Dec. 16 that its proprietary machine translation technology based on the universal Machine Translation Post Edit (MTPE) model continues to improve the efficiency of human translation, reducing translation time by 30%. Currently, the technology supports translations from simplified Chinese to Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and other languages.
 
Translating for films and TV shows has been a time-consuming process as the complexity of lines requires manual proofreading on top of machine translation. To improve efficiency, iQIYI self-developed the translation technology, which leverages references from iQIYI’s rich content library and incorporates multi-dimensional recognition abilities. The new technology lowers the lowest error rate of machine-translated lines to less than 1%, which is 80% lower than the average error rate of what third-party machine translation platforms produce. Meanwhile, for translations from simplified Chinese into several other languages, the accuracy rate is close to that of the human translation.

Translated subtitles for iQIYI Original “Love Under the Full Moon”

In addition, using an AI-based one-to-many translation model, iQIYI’s translation technology can "learn" one language expression and apply this knowledge to other languages of the same language family.
 
As of now, some of the iQIYI dramas in Malaysia have completely switched from manual translation to automated AI translation. As its application grows in scale, the technology is expected to help iQIYI save translation costs and improve efficiency.

iQIYI Launched Intelligent Dubbing Platform to Improve Production Efficiency

Starting in January 2021, iQIYI has utilized its iQDubbing platform to dub dramas issued overseas. This makes iQIYI the first content platform to apply voice conversation technology to dubbing.
 
While traditional dubbing requires many voice actors for one piece of content, iQDubbing only needs one for all the parts. IQDubbing manages this by leveraging AI algorithms to differentiate between and split up the content (lines), rhythm (emotion), and timbre (character personality traits) of a piece of voice material. The platform then synthesizes different voices for various characters without affecting the content and rhythm features output. In addition, using AI algorithms, IQDubbing can also automatically produce sound clips for post-production by adding sound effects, audio-visual alignment, and automatic volume adjustment.
 
As a result, IQDubbing greatly reduces the time cost of dubbing. For example, for a 45-minute TV show episode, dubbing with IQDubbing takes only 1/6 of the time traditional dubbing would take.
 
Using AI technologies, iQIYI aims to empower premier Chinese language content to gain popularity overseas. IQDubbing currently supports Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai, making it increasingly useful for iQIYI contents launched and / or distributed overseas. For instance, IQDubbing has supported the Vietnamese dubbing of popular Chinese series including Moonlight, Forever and Ever, and One and Only, as well as the Thai dubbing of Love in the Kitchen and others.
 
Top international tech conferences also recognized the continuous exploration and enhancement iQIYI engages in technologically. Written jointly by iQIYI’s algorithm team and a team from the Northwestern Polytechnical University, the papers "Accent and Speaker Disentanglement in Many-to-many Voice Conversion" and “Enriching Source Style Transfer in Recognition-Synthesis based Non-Parallel Voice Conversion” were included in Interspeech 2021 and ISCSLP2021, respectively, both top international conferences in the field of speech technology.

iQIYI Qiyu Dream Wins “Innovative VR Device of the Year”

On Dec. 16, Qiyu Dream, the latest VR all-in-one machine from iQIYI Smart, was awarded “Innovative VR Device of the Year” on Sina Technology’s "2021 Technology List,” making the device the only selected all-in-one VR machine from the industry. Qiyu Dream was first launched on Dec. 1. As of Dec. 10, the first batch of Qiyu Dream has already sold out—just two days after its official release on e-commerce platforms.
 
Qiyu Dream won the award because of the technological innovation, advanced features, outstanding user experiences, and unique content ecosystem it presents. On content ecology, for example, Qiyu Dream is working with over 100 games developers across the globe to introduce over 100 games to the device in 2022. More importantly, by being the first VR product to be priced at under RMB 2,000 yuan, Qiyu Dream greatly facilitates the popularization of VR products.

Qiyu Dream

iQIYI Smart CEO XIONG Wen said that metaverse provides a unique opportunity for users to go between the physical and virtual realities and explore all the potentials it could bring. “Qiyu Dream is positioned to be that perfect entrance into virtual reality for users,” Xiong added, “what the company wants to become is ultimately a dream creator.”