iFLYTEK wants to build a better world through artificial intelligence

Source: Xinhua | 2020-01-11

"We are using artificial intelligence to build a better world," Duan Dawei, senior vice president of iFLYTEK Co. Ltd, a Chinese information technology company, told Xinhua on Wednesday at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here.

iFLYTEK unveiled a number of consumer and business products for the first time in the United States at its product exhibition and public interaction sessions held at the Caesars Palace Las Vegas Hotel, drawing visitors from North America and other parts of the world.

Founded in 1999, iFLYTEK is a well-known intelligent speech and artificial intelligence (AI) company in the Asia-Pacific region.

"The CES is a stage for technology companies from across the world to enhance cooperation and exchanges and a window for American people and international society to know more about top Chinese technology companies," said Duan, adding that he hopes a deeper understanding of iFLYTEK would help to remove misapprehension and prejudice by some people on Chinese top AI companies.

"As a leading Chinese artificial intelligence company, we have accumulated a wealth of experience to apply artificial intelligence technology to create better life for people in areas such as education, medicine, office applications and translation," said Duan, noting that the company is willing to share its experience with other countries in need.

"This is the sixteenth year of iFLYTEK's deep engagement in smart education." Duan introduced the company's smart education system as well as new products in areas such as medicine, linguistic and cultural communications, to visitors.

iFLYTEK's educational products now range from teaching to learning, and are now utilized in 35,000 schools all over China, serving hundreds of millions of teachers and students. The smart education system provides students in remote areas with access to educational resources previously only available in more developed areas, and thus promotes equality in education.

In the area of medicine, iFLYTEK has developed a system that passed the national qualifying exam for medical practitioners, and this system is currently providing diagnostic assistance to first-line medical responders.

With a wish of "bettering life through science," iFLYTEK bridged the communication chasm between hearing-impaired and visually-impaired individuals with its smart speech and AI technologies. Its speech recognition technologies enable hearing-impaired individuals to "see" voice, and its speech synthesis technologies enable visually-impaired ones to "hear" text.

In order to break down communication barriers arising from linguistic difference, iFLYTEK has been merging smart speech technologies with real applications, helping with more international interactions, and aiming at completely barrier-free communications between mankind.

People all over the world enjoy the linguistic convenience provided by iFLYTEK Translator. The iFLYTEK Translator 2.0, the 2019 CES Innovation Award honoree in the Tech For A Better World product category, supports translations between Chinese and more than 50 other languages. iFLYTEK Translator has seen 500 million instances of usage since its launch, according to the company.

In 2019, iFLYTEK became the official exclusive provider of automatic speech transcription and translation services for Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics.

"Our products of speech recognition, speech synthesis and machine translation will serve friends from everywhere in the world," Duan said.

"iFLYTEK will continue to promote education and medicine with AI technologies as well as to support linguistic and cultural communications," he said, noting that the company will bring the AI era to more individuals.