iFlytek
The Chinese AI firm that started with speech technology
China Big tech Mixed
WHAT IT IS
iFlytek was founded in 1999 and has long focused on speech recognition, speech synthesis and natural-language processing. It packages speech capability as APIs and consumer products, and builds language models on top. Its speech synthesis is widely used in Chinese-language settings.
Why it matters
It turned speech recognition and synthesis into mature, commercially usable building blocks, and has long been a main supplier of Chinese-language speech technology.
Key milestones
- 1999
Founded
- 2023
Released the SparkTTS speech-synthesis service