iFlytek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in 1999 by Liu Qingfeng and fellow students from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. It specialises in intelligent speech and language technologies - speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and natural-language processing - and is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
The company built an early lead in Chinese-language voice technology, launching what it describes as the first Chinese deep-neural-network speech recognition system in 2011 and serving as a transcription and translation provider for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. More recently it has moved into large language models with its Spark series, including a model it markets as running on fully domestic computing hardware in response to US chip-export controls.
Why a business reader should care: iFlytek is one of the original Chinese AI national champions, named in China’s AI development plans, and its push toward domestic chips shows how export restrictions are reshaping the technology choices of even well-established firms.