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EnglishRecently, Qin Shuo attended the CES exhibition in Las Vegas.
Throughout his trip across the United States, a "secret weapon" was always stuck to the back of his phone—the DingTalk A1 voice recorder. Whether capturing inspiration during dinner gatherings, extracting key points from high-level interviews, or tracking information at press conferences, this compact device accompanied him from morning till night, seamlessly handling tasks ranging from simple to complex, and seemed to be everywhere he went.
Below is his firsthand account of using this device.
A Past of Awkward Encounters with Recording Equipment
Since entering the media industry in 1990, recording equipment has been an indispensable partner in my work. At first, I used bulky tape recorders as big as bricks, paired with TDK tapes; later, I switched to tiny digital recorders smaller than a cellphone, storing audio on mini-cassettes. After each recording session, I had to repeatedly play back the tapes, transcribing every sentence by hand.
My professional journey has been closely intertwined with various recording tools.
Although I'm fairly skilled at content editing, I've often felt clumsy when it comes to operating technical equipment. Even with a simple tape recorder that has only a few buttons—record, stop, fast-forward, rewind, and play—I kept making mistakes.
The most unforgettable incident occurred in 1993, when I represented Nanfengchuang in a joint interview with Li Ziliu, then mayor of Guangzhou. A Xinhua News Agency reporter asked the questions, while I was responsible for recording and note-taking. For some reason, I accidentally pressed the wrong button, and soon afterward, I noticed the tape had started to bulge out. Fortunately, the mayor didn't notice anything unusual. I quickly stuffed the device into my pocket and hit the stop button.
Only when I played back the recording later did I realize that most of the conversation hadn't been recorded at all. I had no choice but to ask a TV reporter at the scene for help, pretending I needed to verify the transcript, so I could piece together the missing information. This experience haunted me for a long time.
Ever since then, whether I'm using a digital recorder, a smart notebook, or a smartphone app, I can't help but frequently check whether the device is actually recording. For important interviews, I even start two phones simultaneously as a double backup, just to feel a bit more at ease.
It wasn't until one day, while flipping through my daughter's college textbook, that I came across Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. In the book, Norman points out that when a product is difficult to use, people tend to blame themselves—but the real problem lies in the design itself. "User error should not be blamed on the individual; instead, we need to rethink the design of the product and its interface," he writes.
It turned out—it wasn't that I wasn't careful enough!
Even though this realization brought me some peace of mind, in reality, it's still hard to find a truly "user-centered" recording tool that is intuitive and easy to use. Especially today, when many interviews involve English, and the era of self-media demands rapid content production, the pressure remains high.
First Experience with an AI Add-On: The Arrival of the DingTalk A1 Voice Recorder
It wasn't until I recently attended CES (Consumer Electronics Show) and tried the DingTalk AI Voice Recorder (DingTalk A1) for the first time that I finally said goodbye to my recording anxiety. This lightweight device attaches to the back of your phone and supports intelligent transcription, content summarization, real-time translation in eight languages, and simultaneous interpretation in more than 20 languages. Even in noisy environments like a bustling street market, it can capture clear audio, record complete conversations, translate accurately, and generate precise summaries—making it my first true "AI add-on."
From the heavy tape recorders of the analog era to today's AI voice recorder weighing just 40 grams; from manual transcription to automatic speech-to-text, key-point extraction, and meeting-minute generation—this evolution clearly reflects my personal journey from informationization and digitization to the age of intelligence.
Let AI Have Its Own "Body"
At 11:49 a.m. on January 4, I boarded flight UA2229 from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. In the airport lounge, I opened the packaging of the DingTalk AI Voice Recorder and found the main unit, a protective case, and a magnetic ring. I simply stuck the magnetic ring onto the back of my phone and then attached the main unit to it. The device itself has only a record button and a voice-command button; all other operations are handled through the DingTalk app. Downloading the app and activating the device required no instructional guidance whatsoever, and the process went smoothly from start to finish.
When I attached this business-card-sized device to my phone, a nearby couple of foreign tourists became curious and asked what it was. I replied, "This is a new type of device I've never seen before. It can record, translate, and convert speech to text." They couldn't help but exclaim, "It's so cool."
The theme of this year's CES is AI, and the core trend is the shift from "informational AI" to "physical AI"—artificial intelligence is deeply integrating with hardware, infusing physical devices with an intelligent "soul." For example, AI glasses act like adding "real-time subtitles" to the real world, while the AI voice recorder integrates the power of large-scale language models directly into a compact card.
This direction is often referred to as "Everything Is AI" or "Edge AI," and some call it "Everything Is Computable." I summarize it as "terminal AI-ization, AI terminalization." As the capabilities of large language models continue to improve, AI is reshaping every type of physical hardware.
The DingTalk AI Voice Recorder may look like a card, but inside it houses a 6-nanometer AI audio chip, equipped with five omnidirectional microphones and one bone-conduction microphone. It supports voiceprint recognition and spatial localization, enabling visualized recording. All recorded data is encrypted both on the device and in the cloud, ensuring privacy and security, and it also supports intelligent AI-powered features.
How Did I Use It at CES?
On the morning of January 5, my CES schedule officially kicked off. I attended a Lenovo Group pre-launch event at the Venetian Hotel, where several experts presented personal intelligent computing devices in English. I sat in the first row on the right side of the audience, with the stage about five or six meters to the left front. I activated the DingTalk voice recorder and turned on the "real-time translation" feature, listening while simultaneously checking the English original and the Chinese real-time transcription. By the end of the half-hour presentation, the AI had automatically generated key takeaways and sectioned the content into chapters. The resulting summary could be used directly in DingTalk or exported for sharing.
My initial experience was excellent: the features perfectly matched my needs, the operation was intuitive, and the recognition accuracy was high. Although there were occasional translation errors for specialized terms, the performance would continue to improve if the system were allowed to learn from my personal corpus. Traditional speech recognition typically achieves around 70% accuracy; general-purpose large language models reach about 80%; and DingTalk, powered by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab technology and trained on 100 million hours of audio and video data, boasts an accuracy rate of 90%, which can be further optimized to 97% for specific tasks.
That same afternoon, I joined a lunch meeting with executives from a New York PR firm at an outdoor restaurant. The environment was noisy, and five people took turns speaking, yet the voice recorder maintained high-quality audio capture. With the "real-time translation" feature enabled, communication efficiency improved significantly.
On the morning of the 6th, I met with the chief operating officer for North Asia-Pacific at another hotel restaurant. The room was filled with chatter, and some voices in the three-way conversation were muffled, but the voice recorder still captured everything clearly.
Later that morning, I joined fellow media colleagues in interviewing Johannes Holzmuller, the FIFA Director of Innovation. The environment was quiet, and the recording quality, along with the AI-generated minutes, were outstanding.
By the morning of the 7th, I had already grown quite familiar with operating the voice recorder, as I conducted three consecutive group interviews with Lenovo executives. Yang Yuanqing mentioned that AI is now ubiquitous: once users grant permission, AI agents embedded in devices can not only respond to commands but also proactively carry out tasks. In the near future, various types of hardware may transform from "passive tools" into "proactive collaborators."
Over the entire exhibition period, I recorded about seven to eight hours of audio, and the battery consumed less than 30%. According to the official specifications, the battery can last up to 45 hours, and it supports Type-C charging, so I could easily recharge it with a standard phone charger at any time—no need to worry about running out of power.
In the afternoon of January 7, I made a point of visiting the DingTalk booth (No. 22020) to express my gratitude. Since I attached it to my phone, I haven't taken it off once.
For me, the device's three standout features are: first, it can capture clear audio even at long distances and in noisy environments; second, it supports real-time and simultaneous translation, making it ideal for international settings; third, it instantly transcribes recordings and automatically generates summaries, greatly saving post-production time. While it's not perfect, its capabilities can evolve continuously with use—unlike traditional hardware with fixed functions.
A New Era of AI-Powered Hardware Is Unfolding
In fact, the features I used are just the tip of the iceberg.
For example, its built-in AI Q&A feature allows you to build a knowledge base from existing recordings and answer queries. In the past, dealing with lengthy documents required repeated searching; now, you can simply ask, "What did someone say about a particular topic?" and the answer appears instantly.
Another example: multiple recordings can be integrated to generate a unified meeting record, making it especially suitable for users who need to consolidate interviews from multiple parties or handle large volumes of audio data.
I haven't yet explored these advanced features in depth, which shows that when it comes to using tech tools, I'm still a "slow learner."
But unlike in the past, today's "slow birds" can leverage the power of AI to take flight earlier.
For businesses, the value of the DingTalk AI Voice Recorder is even more pronounced. At the DingTalk AI 1.1 launch event, Xu Xiaoying from Youcheng shared a case: at first, the chairman was puzzled that employees traveling to Mexico were equipped with voice recorders. However, during a meeting involving Spanish and Japanese, the voice recorder not only translated the Spanish content in real time but also uncovered critical information that had been missed by human translators, greatly improving communication quality. The company immediately decided to equip all management and overseas staff with the device.
At this year's CES, I saw many innovative AI-powered hardware devices, such as rings, necklaces, and earrings—wearable accessories designed not just to be "wearable," but to be "workable" and "interactive"—say something to them, and they can understand and respond. AI is moving from the cloud to everyday objects, becoming embedded in the things we use every day.
This progress is driven by the rapid development of large AI models in recent years, as well as breakthroughs in five key technologies—chips, algorithms, architecture, perception, and communication (such as NPU + storage-compute integration, lightweight large models, and multi-sensor fusion)—which enable portable devices to become incredibly smart through a "local collection + mobile/cloud computing" model.
According to a Frost & Sullivan report, the global market for AI edge hardware is projected to grow from 321.9 billion yuan in 2025 to 1.22 trillion yuan in 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 40%—far exceeding that of traditional consumer electronics.
Although challenges such as insufficient proprietary data, high computing costs, and reliance on networks still remain, the biggest advantage of AI hardware lies in the rapid iteration capability enabled by the integration of software and hardware. For example, a humanoid robot that couldn't walk steadily in a half-marathon race in Beijing last year was able to perform real-world tasks just a few months later. NVIDIA has even shortened the update cycle for its AI GPU architecture from two years to one, accelerating the evolution of the "robot brain."
As China's largest collaborative office platform, with 26 million organizations and 700 million individual users, DingTalk benefits from a vast ecosystem of meetings, communications, and office scenarios, providing fertile ground for innovative AI hardware. The DingTalk Voice Recorder thus represents Alibaba's strategic push into consumer-grade hardware in the AI era.
This product integrates Alibaba's computing resources and the Tongyi large language model technology. DingTalk's exploration of intelligent hardware across various industries also reflects whether Alibaba's large language models can be widely "landed" and applied in practical scenarios.
Epilogue
China's manufacturing sector has long possessed strong supply-chain capabilities. Now is the critical moment to deeply integrate AI into all types of hardware. This not only upgrades "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing," but also signifies that the very equipment used in production is becoming intelligent.
In this process, major internet super apps and large AI companies are all launching "ecological terminalization" strategies. In addition to DingTalk, other tech giants are also developing corporate voice AI terminals, smart customer-service/meeting devices, cross-platform embedded solutions, and other diverse forms of hardware.
DingTalk's vision is to create a complete closed loop—from task capture and content analysis to collaborative execution—through software-hardware synergy. By providing hardware that is accessible to everyone, DingTalk aims to help organizations accumulate data assets and truly unlock the potential of AI. This is a full-stack path spanning software, AI, hardware, and enterprise services, with broad prospects ahead.
From this small voice recorder, I see that, backed by China's strong manufacturing base, a well-developed supply chain, a massive organizational scale, and rich application scenarios, a grand new era of AI-powered hardware has already arrived.
This also symbolizes that we are moving from the mobile internet era toward a new generation of interconnectedness, in which intelligent entities and intelligent hardware are deeply integrated—and the curtain has already risen.
| Author: Qin Shuo
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