Statistics from Unicef mentioned that there are almost 60 million left-behind children in China. That is almost the entire population of Italy. Left-behind children are children who remain in rural China while their parents leave for work in urban areas. For most of these children, they are cared for by their grandparents or family friends.

Left-behind children mostly see their parents once a year or every few years. The toll that this takes on both the parents and child are both physical and emotional. For them, they grow up without a mother or fatherly figure in the poor rural environment, often venturing out as soon as they reach adolescent. The vicious cycle continues.

Tencent believes in the power of technology and innovation. They recognize this societal problem and decides to use its innovative and technology capabilities to help parents and children bridge their emotional and physical gap.

It uses voice recognition technology; utilizing deep neural networks to re-create the voice of the parent(s). First, speech fragments from either the father or mother are recorded. We feed these fragments to the deep neural networks that then analyses the speech patterns and recreate more representations of them in different tonalities and stages of complexity.

Finally, a text-to-speech system is created using the specific voice that was created. The AI system is then housed in a custom-built speaker.