Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

Initially, only 200 riders were scheduled to be online today, but before five o’clock, all the participating restaurants were already swamped with orders.

In this city of over seven million people, there were far more working folks who couldn’t go home for the New Year than Pei Yi had imagined.

So, Xia Xiangyu urgently called in over 100 more riders, which finally eased the pressure on deliveries.

Li Zhou was one of them. He bundled himself up tightly. The weather outside was cold, but his heart was blazing with excitement.

In addition to a 500-yuan holiday bonus, Kuai Pao Riders online today were eligible for a series of rewards for completing a high volume of orders. He glanced at his phone screen—37 orders had earned him 592 yuan, bringing his average pay per delivery to 16 yuan.

’If I keep this up all night, I could make 1,000 yuan!’

Li Zhou grinned, hopped on his Electric Vehicle, and sped off toward Madam Luzhou to pick up a delivery.

「Meanwhile.」

After finishing New Year’s Eve dinner with Lao Chen, Chen Yansen had Xiaoli drive the man back to his apartment complex.

He, in turn, checked into a hotel, getting an executive suite on the top floor. Standing before the floor-to-ceiling windows, he pulled out his phone and called Song Yuncheng.

”You’re not here. What if I can’t sleep?”

Chen Yansen asked softly, a devil-may-care smirk playing on his lips.

”Has a grown man like Boss Chen not yet learned how to sleep alone?” Song Yuncheng retorted.

”Come keep me company,” Chen Yansen said, getting straight to the point.

”I... I can’t get away. I can’t very well tell my aunt I have to go to my boss’s hotel room on New Year’s Eve to give him a work report, can I?”

Song Yuncheng teased with a laugh.

”You’re smart; I’m sure you can find an excuse. I’ll be waiting for you at the hotel.”

With that, Chen Yansen hung up.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. Listening to the dial tone, Song Yuncheng’s expression froze, and she seethed in frustration.

’That guy is completely unreasonable!’

Lujiang and Chunshen were over a hundred kilometers apart—a two-hour drive even on the highway.

But after a moment’s thought, she turned, entered the main hall, and said to her aunt and uncle, ”Han Xue invited me and a few classmates to play mahjong. If we go too late, I’ll just sleep over at her place.”

Her aunt knew Han Xue was one of Song Yuncheng’s high school friends, but in her memory, Song Yuncheng rarely played mahjong, let alone pulled an all-nighter for it.

The aunt thought for a moment. Though she found it a bit strange, she said nothing, merely adding a word of caution, ”It’s cold outside. Put on another layer so you don’t freeze.”

Hearing this, Song Yuncheng couldn’t help but let out a long sigh of relief. She grabbed her car keys and went out the door.

”Little Orange has changed so much,” the aunt mused, watching Song Yuncheng’s retreating figure.

”Well, Little Orange’s luck has certainly turned. She’s dating an outstanding man. He’s only in his twenties and already the boss of an e-commerce company and the president of a tech firm, with a net worth in the tens of billions.”

Her uncle took a sip of his tea and chimed in with a smile.

”Little Orange earned it herself, too! She followed Chen Yansen to sell phone cards and travel for business to meet clients. Every single one of those deals was the result of her own hard work, wasn’t it?”

The aunt shot her husband a look and retorted.

”Yes, yes, you have a point,” her husband chuckled, choosing not to argue with his wife.

Once outside, Song Yuncheng pressed the unlock button on her key fob and slid into the driver’s seat of an Aston Martin Rapide.

Before the holiday break, Chen Yansen had given her the keys, telling her to use the car for her trip home.

At first, she hadn’t understood his reasoning, but after driving the car back to Lujiang, she noticed a distinct change in how her relatives and friends treated her.

In truth, it left a bitter taste in Song Yuncheng’s mouth. Four years ago, after tragedy struck her family, only her aunt had been willing to take in her and her brother. The rest of their relatives had avoided them like the plague.

That was why, even though she had money now, she hadn’t bought a single bottle of liquor or carton of cigarettes to visit any of those so-called ’aunts and uncles’.

The highway was utterly deserted late at night. Sometimes, more than ten minutes would pass without her seeing another car.

She arrived in Chunshen before ten o’clock.

”Master, come down and get me.” Song Yuncheng parked the car and walked into the hotel lobby.

Chen Yansen received her text, set aside his laptop, and took the elevator down to the ground floor.

”Did you miss me?” Song Yuncheng asked with a beaming smile, her lips pursed and a faint blush coloring her fair cheeks.

”Take a guess,” Chen Yansen replied, his expression calm.

”I came all this way with just one phone call from you. Can’t I at least hear the words I want to hear?”

Song Yuncheng pouted, giving Chen Yansen a pitiful look.

”Well, well. You’ve gotten a lot bolder, haven’t you? Daring to make demands of your boss now?”

Chen Yansen raised his hand and rapped her on the head.

Song Yuncheng winced in pain. ’That bastard Chen Yansen,’ she thought. ’He doesn’t know his own strength.’

”Chen Bapi,” Song Yuncheng muttered under her breath.

”I’m taking you to see my mom tomorrow,” Chen Yansen said nonchalantly, walking straight into the elevator.

Song Yuncheng scrambled to follow him, an irrepressible smile spreading across her face. Emboldened, she asked, ”Did Meng Jie ever get to go?”

”Her? Of course not.”

Chen Yansen stated it as a simple fact.

”Okay,” Song Yuncheng said, taking Chen Yansen’s arm and nodding sweetly.

Back in the suite, Chen Yansen sat down at the desk, his fingers flying across the keyboard.

”What’s that?” Song Yuncheng asked curiously.

”It’s the code framework for a voice recognition tool. I’m planning to build a smart voice assistant into the next generation of the Orange Mobile Phone.”

Chen Yansen replied.

”Something like Siri?” Song Yuncheng asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

”More or less. But I find CMU Sphinx difficult to use—its recognition accuracy is low, its training efficiency is poor, and it lacks a visual interface. That’s why I decided to develop my own.”

Chen Yansen didn’t stop typing as he spoke.

Noticing Song Yuncheng’s confused expression, he added, ”CMU Sphinx is an open-source voice recognition toolkit, used primarily for processing speech and text data.”

”You know so much,” Song Yuncheng said, a flash of admiration in her eyes.

”Of course. When it comes to ’positions,’ the more you know, the better,” Chen Yansen said with a slight smile. He quickly finished up the design for the model’s architecture, closed his laptop, and swept Song Yuncheng up into his arms, carrying her toward the bathroom.

「The next morning.」

Chen Yansen took Song Yuncheng on a trip to Beishan.

”Your mother was so beautiful, but Uncle Chen...” Song Yuncheng trailed off, her mind filled with questions after respectfully offering incense and seeing the photograph of Liang Hui Zhen.

”When Lao Chen was young, he had a bit of my handsome charm. Now that he’s older and doesn’t care about his appearance, he just looks disheveled and run-down.”

Chen Yansen said with a laugh.

”No wonder Uncle Chen was always kicking you when you were a kid. I bet you deserved every single one,” Song Yuncheng said, giggling behind her hand.

Chen Yansen rolled his eyes and ignored her. Facing the gravestone, he asked silently in his heart, ’Mom, what do you think of this one? If you approve, send your son a dream.’

Song Yuncheng stayed in Chunshen until ten o’clock before rushing back to Lujiang without a break.

For the next few days, Chen Yansen holed himself up in the hotel, continuing to refine the voice recognition tool’s acoustic model, as well as its convolutional, deep, and recurrent neural network models.

He was only responsible for building the overall framework; the detailed work would be handed over to graduates from Huake University, Luzhou Industry, and Huian University of Technology.

Normally, it’s exceedingly difficult for a single person to develop a voice recognition tool from scratch. Such a task requires mastery of speech signal processing techniques as well as proficiency in programming languages and algorithmic models.

However, Chen Yansen had long ago amassed a vast reserve of the relevant technical expertise. A research and development task that others would consider highly complex and comprehensive was, to him, merely a beginner-level challenge.

By January 27th, the overall framework for the voice recognition tool, which had been christened ”Voice-Parse,” was complete.

But it was still a far cry from being ready to launch.

The core function of a voice recognition tool is converting speech signals into text, a process that requires a massive amount of data.

To accurately recognize speech from different genders, ages, dialects, and speaking speeds—not to mention recordings made in various environments—requires a massive corpus of voice data. All this data must then be accurately transcribed before the models can even begin their training.

For now, ”Voice-Parse” was nothing more than an empty shell.