Chapter 161: Human Answering Service

It was now the end of August. School holidays were about to end, and a new school term would begin. It had also been two months since the release of the second generation of the Little Star learning machine. During this time, Chang Cheng Electric, as the OEM company in charge of manufacturing the second generation of the Little Star learning machine, pushed their production capacities to the limit. Even when the humans took a break, the machines never stopped working. Each day, the factory assembled an average of 200,000 units of the learning machine. In two months, they had produced 12 million units. 60% of those (7,200,000 units) belonged to the Department of Education.

The remaining 40% (4,800,000 units) belonged to Xing Hai Technologies. The company was able to quickly sell off this batch of second-generation learning machines via the Starnet model. They were sold to the vast number of primary school children, junior high schoolers, and senior high schoolers. The total number of these students neared 200 million. Amongst them, there were many who came from well-to-do family backgrounds. Therefore, the moment stock was made available on the Starnet, they were sold out almost instantaneously.

After all, the parents could afford that little bit of money. The students also wanted to use the learning machine as soon as possible so that they could get a headstart in raising their grades. Hence, this caused demand to outstrip supply. As the demand was so great, some junior sales representatives had to sell the learning machine to one parent at the expense of another parent. Because of this, they suffered intimidation, insults, and threats from some parents. There were two sales representatives who were beaten up by parents. Due to mental stress, there were more than ten sales representatives who resigned.

Of course, Xing Hai Technologies had to protect the rights of their junior sales representatives. Many parents were blacklisted. On the other hand, some sales representatives could not resist the temptation of raising the price of the learning machines for their own profits. Every day, a few of them would be fired. The audit system was getting stricter.

It was good that school would begin soon. The few million units of Little Star second gen that had been accumulated by the Department of Education would soon be released into the market. This would reduce the sales pressure faced by Xing Hai Technologies.

Xing Hai Technologies had sent the lead technician, Zhou Qingfeng, to the Department of Education to build a second server there. He was in charge of data migration to the new server as well as the operation and maintenance of the system. Zhou Qingfeng reported, “The Department of Education has assembled a team of experts. They are currently developing a new syllabus system and are preparing to build a new knowledge tree.”

Chen Jin was surprised. “They are not using the original knowledge tree system in Little Star?” That knowledge tree system had undergone more than 200 years of optimizations and improvements. It was very matured and scientific. There were almost no further changes that could be made.

Zhou Qingfeng said resentfully, “No, the experts felt that the original knowledge tree in the Little Star was too coarse, with many illogical areas. They want to proceed with improvements and come up with a better plan… Urgh, President Chen, you know how they are. Those bunch of experts can never make up their minds. The programmers sent there feel like they’ve been tortured. All of them want to request to be sent back to the company. The knowledge tree is even worse; it’s been modified into a mess by those experts. President Chen, I don’t want to stay there anymore either.”

Chen Jin felt unbearably exasperated. Experts… Their brains were filled with bricks! They might just mess up the stellar reputation of the Little Star learning machine. “School will open in a few days and those experts still haven’t come up with a conclusion? If they don’t decide on the knowledge tree system soon, the millions of learning machines that the Department has will remain in their backlog. Because of that, we will have to continue to bear the pressure of the supply shortage.”

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“They made their decision yesterday. The experts said that they want to create a version 1.0 to see how the effects are. If the results are good, they will introduce a batch into the market. If the results are only average, they will continue to improve and upgrade by making a version 2.0, 3.0. They are very confident that the Little Star second gen from the Department of Education would be so much better than the one from our company. They were very contemptuous of us, saying what does a tech company know about education… President Chen, please let me come back to Shang Hai, I can’t stand them anymore!”

Chen Jin was getting frustrated! Hearing this, he had to comfort Zhou Qingfeng. “Just bear with it a little longer. Go along with what the experts are saying. Don’t talk back or argue! We’ll do everything according to what they say for now. In addition, we have to clearly differentiate the Department of Education’s Little Star second gen from the original. They cannot be mixed together; the consumers must never think that they are products from the same organization. Ours is ours; the Department’s is the Department’s.”

“I understand, President Chen. You mentioned this to me last month. Rest assured, there is a logo of the Department of Education on the back of their Little Star second gen learning machines. When the machine is switched on, there is an opening animation set by the Department. The style of the main interface is different too. Differentiation was well done. Many of the differences were requested by those experts. They changed almost every similarity they saw. How else would they prove their achievements to the government?” From Zhou Qingfeng’s tone, one could hear how incredulous he felt.

Chen Jin nodded repeatedly. “Good. That’s good.” He had already concluded in his mind that the entire batch of Little Star second gens that were sent to the Department of Education would soon be nothing but junk. Even if they did not become junk, the results that students achieved after using the learning machines from the Department would be much worse than what they could achieve by using the original. He would bet his life on this! At first, he was worried that the Little Star second gens from the Department of Education would affect his business if they were sold too cheaply. Now, he could let go of this huge worry.

The dumb enemy had given him the means to defeat them. Even if the original Little Star second gens that he had were ten times more expensive than those from the Department of Education, he was not worried that they would not sell. What he was afraid of was the total similarity between the two products. Of course, even if the two types of learning machines were entirely the same, Chen Jin would not continue to dig his own grave. He had a counterattack planned.

He told Song Bojun to lead the technical team to create and install a whole new extended function in the Little Star second gen. After more than two months, their work was completed. It was the Human Answering Service!

Song Bojun introduced, “President Chen, you’re right. The Little Star intelligent learning machine is intelligent. It can basically answer all the learning related questions voiced by the user. However, its answer is usually composed of a bunch of complicated text, pictures, and relevant videos. It will complement with voice expressions when providing answers, but even then it’s reading woodenly from textual materials. There are some actual disabilities when it is expressing its intelligence. For example, primary school students like to ask, ‘Why is the summer sun so hot?’ It provided three sets of answers, eighteen pictures, and six informational videos. Besides the reply given in ‘A Million Whys’ that was simple and easy to comprehend, other answers provided were out of the range of primary school students’ comprehension. Hence we had to do manual screening to keep only the most suitable answer. But, the questions asked by the students are in the thousands and millions. We do not have the manpower to conduct manual screening for the answers to each and every question. So, the ‘Human Answering Service’ added to the Little Star learning machine would be a good solution for this problem.”

Song Bojun smiled. “The mechanism by which this service solves the questions asked by students goes like this; Our back-end database will collect all the questions asked by students and rank them based on frequency. The questions with the highest frequency will be placed at the top of the list and the ones that occurred least frequently will be at the bottom. After the ranking list has been completed, we will announce it and provide relevant information that can help to answer those questions. Then, we’ll publish this with a call for answers from the public. The people who want to answer can make use of the information that we have provided and record a video that answers the question. They can then submit it onto Xing Hai Technologies”Bite-sized Videos’ platform. We suggest that each submitted video should ideally be five minutes or less. The content must be able to answer at least one of the questions fully and should also be interesting. In this way, when students ask similar questions again in the future, they will be redirected to the relevant video submitted in ‘Bite-sized Videos’ and receive their answers.”

Song Bojun grew even more excited. “The video creator can be a teacher, professor, an expert in their field, or even the most ordinary citizen. As long as they are interested in answering the students’ questions, they can record a ‘Bite-sized Video’ and send the manuscript to us. In order to encourage more submissions, we will provide a monetary reward. For example, the video creator will receive 10 cents for each time a student watches the video. If the video was viewed 10 million times, he will receive one million dollars. Students with questions will receive their answers; and with the monetary incentives, ‘Bite-sized Video’ creators will be more motivated to make higher quality videos. As time goes on, through this positive cycle, the human-created videos will be answering all the questions asked by the students. This will slowly resolve the dissatisfaction of those whose profits have been hurt by the introduction of the Little Star learning machine. They can change their professions to provide services via Little Star by recording ‘Bite-sized Videos’ with specialized content. The earlier they come over to us, the more beneficial it is for them. They have the opportunity and power to create one of the first video replies to the high-frequency questions, getting huge monetary rewards in return. Even if many years have passed since their videos were submitted, as long as students are asking these questions, they can receive an income continuously.”

Song Bo Jun gave a thumbs-up. “President Chen, the Human Answering Service that you designed compensates for the shortcomings of the Little Star and improves the user experience in the area of asking questions. It will also alleviate the dilemma that some educational professionals might experience. They will also be able to have hope about gaining something beneficial from this. You’ve killed two birds with one stone; what a marvelous design!” The genius conception by the boss was so awe-inspiring that he wanted to prostrate himself on the ground in admiration.