INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
This year shoppers spent $7.4bn during Black Friday and an additional $9.4bn on Cyber Monday but even when combined, these numbers come
nowhere close to the $38bn spent during Alibaba's Singles' Day.Alibaba Cloud has revealed new details on the core technologies used during
this year's record-breaking, 24-hour global shopping festival with the first being the third generation of its X-Dragon architecture.The
firm's X-Dragon servers are Elastic Bare Metal Servers which helped improved cost efficiency by 20 percent during this years sale
These servers are able to seamlessly integrate computing platforms, including the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) bare metal server and
virtual machines, all in a single architecture.Alibaba Cloud also developed a database called POLARDB which supported sales activity with a
peak of 87 million requests processed per second during Singles' Day
The new generation of the cloud-native POLARDB database combines performance with compatibility as well as the availability of traditional
enterprise databases in a cost-effective manner.During 11.11, Alibaba's customer-service chatbot Alime Shop Assistant, supported by Alibaba
DAMO Academy's machine learning technologies, handled 97 percent of online customer inquiries on the firm's e-commerce platforms Taobao and
Tmall.Alibaba DAMO Academy also provides enhanced machine translation technology for the cross-border e-commerce platform AliExpress
The technology is able to automatically translate merchant's store and product pages into 21 languages for buyers across Europe, Asia,
America and the Middle East
Alibaba DAMO Academy was used 1.66bn times during this year's sale and the service translated over 200bn words into different
languages.Taobao even developed a new, real-time communications framework for audio and video on Alibaba Cloud for this year's Singles' Day
The technology managed to reduce network latency from five to seven seconds to 1.5 seconds while improving the real-time interaction
experience between broadcasters and users
Video AI identified products mentioned by the broadcasters during their live streams and audiences were able to view product links
simultaneously displayed onscreen.Voice search played a role in this year's sale as well and over one million orders were placed and
processed through voice command using Alibaba AI Labs' smart speaker, Tmall Genie.Alibaba's Singles' Day continues to break records and
online retailers in the US and Europe could learn a lot from studying the success of the Chinese e-commerce giant.
