Youdao’s WAIC push spans AI translation, open-source TTS, earbuds and office agents
AGI Hunt · wechat · 2026-07-22
Youdao is pushing an AI-first overhaul across translation, earbuds, and office agents
A long WAIC field report says Youdao has made a major shift in AI organization, staffing, and compute investment, and is now moving toward an AI-native structure.
The article highlights several products:
- AI real-time interpretation that can translate YouTube or live speech into Chinese while preserving the speaker’s voice, supporting up to 124 languages.
- Confucius4-TTS, an open-source zero-shot TTS model with 14 languages, positioned as cross-lingual voice cloning.
- Youdao OpenPods, an MFi-certified AI earbud for translation, meeting transcription, summaries, and task extraction.
- LobsterAI, a desktop agent that connects files, terminal, and browser, with remote control through WeChat/Feishu/DingTalk and multiple expert skill packs.
- Youdao BaoKu, a NotebookLM-like reading product that accepts up to 50 sources and returns cited answers.
The report also says Youdao’s self-developed Ziyue 4.0 model has upgraded to a 27B multimodal version, and that the company is increasingly using agent workflows to reshape education, translation, advertising, and hardware rather than treating AI as a wrapper feature.
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