Abstract
In 1999, riding the wave of speech recognition, iFLYTEK started off as a provider of speech synthesis technology. After nearly ten years of exploration and development, iFLYTEK became the forerunner in China’s intelligent speech technology and market, and was listed on the A-Share market in 2008. Along with the evolution of underlying algorithm and the development of mobile Internet, iFLYTEK gathered new momentum of growth by transforming into a speech service platform. It introduced iFLYTEK Voice Cloud in 2010 and its market capitalization exceeded 40 billion RMB. The rise of AI technology in recent years prompted the company to embark on its second entrepreneurial journey by launching the Hyper Brain Project. Confronted with new opportunities, what challenges will iFLYTEK face and how can it make further innovation?
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- 1.
DingDong Smart Speaker is a smart speaker launched by the joint venture founded by iFLYTEK and JD.com. The user can wake the speaker up into voice interaction through the words “Ding Dong Ding Dong”.
- 2.
Flying Fish is a smart vehicle-mounted system launched in November 2016 by iFLYTEK. Its smart voice interaction technology has been deployed in over 100 car models around the world.
- 3.
iFlyrec is a speech transcription platform featuring smart editing, automatic role separation, accurate audio positioning and playing back sentence by sentence. Its service boasts an accuracy rate of over 97%.
- 4.
Xiaoyi Translator is the Chinese-English translation machine launched in November 2016 and its mass production is scheduled in 2017.
- 5.
Xiaoman robot is the interactive robot designed by iFLYTEK and has been piloted in many banks.
- 6.
Lingxi Voice Assistant is a mobile voice assistant jointly launched by iFLYTEK and China Mobile.
- 7.
Zhixue.com is a mobile online teaching platform of iFLYTEK that provides numerous teaching scenarios such as in-class exercises, homework, and exams.
- 8.
iYuji is a smart voice recording app of iFLYTEK that supports multiple languages and dialects such as English and Sichuanese.
- 9.
Hallmark: Bell Labs built the first speech recognition system that could recognize the 10 numerical digits spoken in English.
- 10.
Speech recognition is applied in either the embedded end or the server end. The embedded end application runs locally and has higher requirement in terms of energy consumption and computing power. It’s often used on hardware or chips.
- 11.
According to this strategy, iFLYTEK aims to become a world-renowned research institution of speech technology and at the same time turn its research results into large-scale application and introduce speech technology to local households.
- 12.
Data comes from iFLYTEK’s annual financial statements in 2008 and 2009.
- 13.
Deep learning was proposed by Hinton and several researchers in 2006. It’s aimed to build neural networks that can learn and analyze data like the human brain.
- 14.
Founded in 1992, Nuance seized 2/3 of market shares in the global intelligent speech market, offering services to Siri, Samsung S-Voice and some call centers.
- 15.
From 2013—2015, the proportion of American smart phone users using voice assistant apps rose from 30 to 65%.
- 16.
In 2015, the global intelligent speech industry was valued at 6.12 billion USD, up 34.2%, while China’s intelligent speech industry was valued at 4.03 billion RMB, up 41%.
- 17.
Its capitalization nearly reached 70 billion RMB in 2012, making it the most valuable software company in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges.
- 18.
Prof. Tang Xiaoou is a top expert in accurate facial recognition technology, real-time population flow monitoring technology, and face-based photo classification technology. The Gaussian Model was used for the first time in iFLYTEK’s facial recognition function, whose accuracy rate was 98.2%, higher than 97.53%, the accuracy rate of human eyes. The application of DEEPID technology later improved this rate to 99.15%.
- 19.
HIT’s LTP-Cloud (Language Technology Platform Cloud) provides developers with services of Chinese word segmentation, POS tagging, named entity recognition, dependency parsing, and semantic role labelling. As the most influential Chinese processing platform, it’s been used by over 500 research institutions and companies, among which Baidu, Tencent, Huawei and Kingsoft are paying users.
- 20.
China Speech Valley is located in the National Demonstration Base for Tech Innovation in Hefei. According to its five-year plan, it will incubate over 500 companies and attract a group of large enterprises engaged in R&D and application of speech technology, so as to become the top speech technology base in China.
- 21.
Source: iFLYTEK’s annual report in 2015.
- 22.
AlphaGo is an AI program that plays the board game Go. It was developed by the team led by Demis Hassabis, David Silver, and Aja Huang from Google DeepMind by using new technologies such as neural network, deep learning and the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm.
- 23.
The first wave began in 1970 when the first generation of neural network algorithm was developed, which proved most of the theorems in Principia Mathematica. The second wave began in 1984 when the Hopfield Network was developed to serve as the memory system of the AI neural network.
- 24.
AIUI integrates full-duplex transmission, microphone array technology, voice print recognition, dialect recognition, semantic understanding and content service. It’s the epitome of iFLYTEK’s R&D results, and represents the highest standard in the industry.
- 25.
Han Jingti, Dean, Internet Finance Research Institute; Director, Experiment Center and Central Asia Research Center for Cloud Computing; Professor and Doctoral Supervisor, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
- 26.
Zhu Yang, CEIBS MBA2017; Senior Manager, New Oriental Suzhou.
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Acknowledgements
This case was written by Prof. Zhu Xiaoming, case writer Qian Wenying and research assistant Zhu Yezi. The case writing was supported by iFLYTEK Co., Ltd.
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Zhu, X. (2019). Case I: iFLYTEK: A Technology Innovator’s Journey from Intelligent Speech to Artificial Intelligence. In: Emerging Champions in the Digital Economy . Management for Professionals. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2628-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2628-8_2
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