[Wogef]

>Large parts of China are still a developing economy. If you’re illiterate, you can’t type, so enabling users to speak to us is critical for helping them find information.

Baidu needs voice search because so many Chinese are illiterate? WTF! This is an incredibly bizarre statement.

He's suggesting there are a significant number of Mainland Chinese users who speak Mandarin good enough for machine transcription- but are illiterate? Anyone who has lived in China for a significant amount of time can tell you that's just not plausible.

The people who have poor reading skills (in ten years I have never met any completely illiterate Chinese) generally only speak their provincial dialect. Last check only 53% of Chinese can communicate in Mandarin, while only 5% are illiterate. The overlap is nearly non-existent.

I think Ng picked up a bit of Singaporean bias during his time there- it certianly seems he has spent no time on the Mainland.

[cadamsau]

Hi Wogef,

Sorry to bother you (and everyone else) on this thread. I'm interested in visiting Shenzhen and would like to meet up. I tried to reach you on the email on your profile but it didn't work. Are you able to reach out on the email in my profile?

Regards,

[irv]

wikipedia describes the situation here [0], but i think in general "literate" has a specific meaning here, that you need to know x amount of characters. Some cursory googling leads me to believe the rate for urban dwellers is 2000 characters, but for rural it's only 1500. According to a UNESCO study a few years ago, "11% of the world’s 800 million illiterate adults live in China."

I know it's comparing apples to oranges, but some of my friends in Hong Kong are perfectly fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin but really, really struggle with reading and writing.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese#Literacy

[3rd3]

Maybe they are attempting to include all dialects.