iFlytek

Liu Qingfeng, who was then a Ph.D. student in the University of Science and Technology of China, started a voice computing company, iFlytek in 1999. Liu and his colleagues were operating the company at the USTC campus until they decided to moved it in Heifei. He also presented his business concept to then head of Microsoft Research Asia, Kai-Fu Lee, who warned Liu of competing to American advancements in speech recognition.

iFlytek would later work under the telecommunications company Huawei. In 2008, the company went public. In 2010, they launch their major consumer product, the iFlytek Input.

In 2017, Human Rights Watch reported the Chinese government had collected tens of thousands of voice samples, for use with iFlytek technology that identifies individuals by voice on phone calls or in public places.

In 2018, iFlytek signed a five-year collaboration agreement with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2020, the agreement was terminated due to concerns about human rights abuses of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

China's government designated iFlytek as one of its "AI champions" in 2018.

In 2019, the company won the Applicative Award for its iFlytek translation system with the Super AI Leader award at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Shanghai.

In October 2023, the stock value of iFlytek fell after its AI-powered devices were reported to have criticized Mao Zedong.

In 2024, iFlytek introduced the AI platform SparkGen, an automated video creation tool. That same year in June 2024 during the unveiling of its Xinghuo 4 large language model (LLM), founder Liu Qingfeng admits that due to U.S. restrictions such as those of U.S. components used in computing platforms, the company will pursue to train its LLMs on "self-developed, controllable" infrastructure. The company stated that their LLMs were trained completely using Huawei's computing platform.

Voice speech and recognition systems

One of the company's major product was the iFlytek Input released in 2010. It was one of the early counterparts of Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Assistant in China. Later versions of Input allowed translations for face-to-face conversations and closed-captioning for phone calls in 23 Chinese dialects.

In terms of research and development in speech recognition, iFlytek showcased during a 2017 visit of U.S. President Donald Trump to Beijing, that their technology can identify and record an individual's voice in a crowded environment.

iFlytek Spark

iFlytek Spark (Chinese: 讯飞星火), also known as iFLYTEK Spark Desk, is a large language model developed by iFlytek. iFlytek Spark was first unveiled in May 2023 and was released in September 2023 after the Chinese government's approval.

History

On May 6, 2023, iFlytek CEO Liu Qingfeng unveiled their AI model SparkDesk. The large language model was developed based on Huawei's AI chip, Ascend. It was then updated to SparkDesk 2.0 in August 2023 and SparkDesk 3.0 in October 2023.

Chinese regulations

In 2021, iFlytek, along with Chinese gaming company Tencent Holdings, received a notice for violation from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China (MIIT) for not rectifiying privacy concerns.

U.S. sanctions

In October 2019, iFlytek was sanctioned by the United States for allegedly using its technology for mass surveillance and human rights abuses in Xinjiang.