>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.