Chinese AI Firm iFlytek Shows Off ChatGPT Competitor
- By Paul Mah
- July 05, 2023
Chinese AI solution provider iFlytek has announced Singapore as its first strategic destination for its global expansion.
The announcement was made as part of a technology summit held on June 20 at the Parkroyal Beach Road, which saw the Shenzhen Stock Exchange-listed firm showcase its AI capabilities to local partners.
Despite the red-hot interest in AI, iFlytek is no startup. Founded in 1999, iFlytek has over 15,000 employees and was once ranked as the 6th smartest company by MIT Technology Review – just behind Alphabet – and ahead of Intel and Apple.
AI-powered language capabilities
At the event, iFlytek focused on sharing the technical capabilities of the iFlytek Spark AI model, as well as the capabilities of its open platform for delivering speech-related capabilities, and consumer hardware products.
iFlytek says that its Spark AI model has been upgraded since its release, and can now handle open-ended knowledge quizzes, solve logic and mathematics questions, and even converse across multiple rounds of dialogue.
The firm also talked about its iFlytek Open Platform, which is used by developers around the world for its speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and image recognition capabilities.
iFlytek technology is used extensively globally, including by top, well-recognized platforms, says company executives.
“As of June 2023, the total number of developers of iFlytek Open Platform (International Site) has exceeded 120,000, among which the number of developers in Southeast Asia has reached 40,000,” said Zhou Chuanfu, vice president of the iFlytek Open Platform Business Group.
ChatGPT, meet your rival
Of notable mention would be iFlytek’s large-language model (LLM) that the firm bills as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. SparkDesk was first unveiled in May, and the company says it has been upgraded since with additional upgrades planned in August and October.
A beta multi-modal version of SparkDesk was demonstrated on stage. SparkDesk was first fed a prompt – ChatGPT-style – which it used to produce a video script in English. Once done, another prompt got it to create an AI-generated video showing a person reading the just-generated script.
ChatGPT has a first-mover advantage, company executives concede. However, iFlytek claims that its LLM will achieve parity with ChatGPT by October this year. A chart showing a date of October 24 was shown on the screen.
It is hard to tell how good SparkDesk currently is without personally testing it. Yet, the audacious claims indicate strong confidence amongst the company's executives. We have reached out to request access in the meantime, but are still awaiting a response from the company.
Real-time translation
There is no question that iFlytek’s technology is more than skin deep. During his presentation, Steven Huang, the general manager for Southeast Asia at iFlytek showed off an AI-created version of himself on screen, speaking multiple languages, one after another.
Among others, the AI-generated person spoke in English, French, Thai, Arabic, and many more. Huang explained his avatar could be made to speak in 60 languages, leveraging his firm’s deep expertise in language and translation.
While new AI startups are essentially software-only firms, iFlytek’s history means that it also sells hardware in the form of handheld translators that can do real-time translation, as well as a smart recorder that offers real-time transcription.
This includes Chinese-English mixed recognition and Singapore English recognition, both of which are commonly encountered in Singapore.
By entering the global market, iFlytek says it hopes to engage in closer communication and collaboration with global users, listening to their needs and feedback, and driving the development and application of its LLMs.
For now, the AI firm says iFlytek servers have been set up in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. It promised that more investment will be forthcoming in Southeast Asia, allowing it to increase the number of languages and improve its quality of service.
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Li Zhou
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.