China's Siri gets upgrades

Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, delivers a keynote speech during the company's product launch event held in Beijing on Nov 23, 2016. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Shenzhen-listed iFLYTEK has unveiled a series of advancements in its artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in Beijing at its annual product launch.

A speech input assistant that is able to provide real-time multi-lingual dictation, a speech synthesis application that allows users to customize the way text is converted to speech, and a voice-activated command system for vehicles were among the new developments outlined.

"AI will be as necessary to life as water and electronics in the next five to 10 years, and it will profoundly change the world," company chairman Liu Qingfeng said.

Hu Yu, rotating president of iFLYTEK, communicates with an English speaking attendee of the company's product launch by using a real-time translation device. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

According to Liu, after 17 years of business development and expansion, the technology start-up initiated by college graduates has become the largest listed enterprise that engaged in AI-driven speech recognition sector in Asia.

It's the Chinese counterpart to US firm Nuance Communications and Siri, the virtual voice assistant developed by Apple.

The speech input assistant demonstrated at the event, works on the company's voice cloud platform and offers real-time translation and dictation of Chinese, Uigur, English, Japanese and Korean.

The company said the accuracy of the system is even better than the interpretation service that is normally provided at international conferences with speakers of different nationalities.

Flying Fish, an in-car voice-activated command system developed by iFLYTEK was on display at the company's product launch held in Beijing on Nov 23. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The in-car voice-activated system, dubbed "Flying Fish", can deliver near-perfect speech recognition in noisy environments, such as bustling streets, and in cars with windows down.

The company said it has established collaboration agreements with more than 30 vehicle manufacturers to deploy the system in more than 100 mass-produced models.

Another major money earner for the company is e-learning. Thanks to the voice-activated technologies deployed in educational institutes by the company, its revenue reached 679 million yuan ($99 million) in the third quarter of this year.

In 2016, iFLYTEK took out the Winograd Schema Challenge, a well-recognized global competition to test machine intelligence.

Recently, the company's breakthroughs in nature language processing defeated rival technology at a conference run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States.

A demonstrator interacts with a service android powered by iFLYTEK's intelligence system during the firm's new product launch held on Nov 23. The androids have been deployed in banks to provide customized services to consumers [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The company estimates that there are about 160,000 developers using the firm's voice cloud platform to work on different applications, more than doubling last year's figure.

According to a commercial report by information provider AI Era, there are between 200 and 250 AI start-ups in China.

"Most of them were established after 2010 and speech recognition and computer vision are the two R&D (research and development) trends for companies to invest heavily in the AI industry," the report stated.