“Smart cars may be one increasingly important avenue going forward, with Baidu having established partnerships with major brands including BMW, Daimler, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and others to integrate its conversational AI platform into their vehicles.”

Baidu has hit a major milestone for its DuerOS voice-based AI platform: The company has announced that it’s now being used in 100 million devices. That’s twice as many as were using the platform just half a year ago, Baidu says.

Much of that growth may be thanks to partners in the mobile industry, with Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo having integrated DuerOS into flagship smartphones. But Baidu’s platform can be incorporated into virtually any kind of device, and the company appears to be constantly on the lookout for new integration opportunities. Smart cars may be one increasingly important avenue going forward, with Baidu having established partnerships with major brands including BMW, Daimler, Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and others to integrate its conversational AI platform into their vehicles.

In a statement announcing the integration milestone, Baidu Smart Living Group General Manager Kun Jing credited much of the growth to the China market. “We are seeing voice input gaining huge adoption in China,” he said, adding that DuerOS “has the largest indexing of Chinese webpages and a better multi-modal semantic understanding of the Chinese language” that give it an advantage in the region against rival platforms.

Meanwhile, recent voice-based AI partnerships with Synaptics and Qualcomm suggest that Baidu’s growth will continue, and may even escalate as enthusiasm for voice interfaces intensifies.