iFLYTEK Co. Ltd.’s product exhibition and public interaction sessions in the United States
In early January 2020, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. will once again visit the United States to demonstrate its products and discuss how they can be used to improve education, medicine, public interest, office applications and translation. This is an opportunity to engage in meaningful communications with various audiences, and share iFLYTEK’s vision, ideals, and experiences.
Individualized Education and Diagnostic Assistance: Broadening Access to Quality Resources
Education
On January 8th during CES 2020, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. will hold a product exhibition and open house in Las Vegas, NV. Its applications of A.I. technology in education and medicine are expected to be of great interest to many attendees.
“This is the sixteenth year of iFLYTEK’s deep engagement in smart education,” said Mr. Dawei Duan, Senior Vice President of iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. iFLYTEK’s education products now cover a wide spectrum of time-consuming teaching tasks, from giving exams to scoring exams, as well as administrative functions. They are currently utilized in 35,000 schools all over China, serving hundreds of millions of teachers and students. Mr. Duan continued, “iFLYTEK’s smart education system can help teachers and students analyze topics and pinpoint individual weaknesses, and thus provide focused remedial exercises and individualized education.”
Statistics show that A.I.-assisted education can shorten not only the time that a teacher spends on scoring exams and homework, freeing the teacher to focus on more important student focused teaching efforts, but also the time it takes a student to learn a new idea or fact. iFLYTEK’s products promote an interest in studying and improve the efficiency of studying, freeing up time for extracurricular activities.
For many, the more important benefit of iFLYTEK Co. Ltd.’s smart education system is that it provides students in remote areas with access to educational resources previously available only in more developed areas, and thus promotes equality in education.
For example, in Jinzhai County, an underdeveloped county in China the Tongxin Elementary School started offering remote class sessions through iFLYTEK Co. Ltd.’s ‘Smart Classroom System’. The students can listen to lectures given by outstanding teachers from the biggest cities and can even upload their homework and questions for further guidance. This allows for access to quality educational resources in remote and underdeveloped locations.
Medicine
iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. has developed a system that passed the national qualifying exam for medical practitioners. This system learned 53 textbooks for doctors and tens of thousands of clinical guidance and cases. It took the qualifying exam for Chinese doctors and passed with flying colors. After more than two years of further refinement and enhancements, it is now providing diagnostic assistance in more than twelve thousand village clinics in China and has been used in more than twenty million cases.
In April 2019, at a rural clinic in Heilongjiang Province, a patient complained of heart discomfort. The head physician entered his symptoms into iFLYTEK Co. Ltd.’s “Smart Doctor Assistant” system and obtained a suggested diagnosis of anterior myocardial infarction. The patient was sent to a hospital in Harbin, the provincial capital, and obtained timely treatment. He was found to be in a state of wide-area myocardial infarction and his life would have been in danger if he had been sent to the hospital just a little bit later.
The system provides two distinct but complementary benefits to patients and healthcare workers: (1) real-time monitoring of clinical records, improving regulation of diagnostic procedures; and (2) diagnostic assistance to first-line medical responders, improving their capabilities and access to quality medical resources.
A.I. for public interest, improving the lives of more people
iFLYTEK’s advances in A.I. also allow technology to help more people. In 2017, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. launched its plans of “A.I. for public interest”, seeking to improve education, medicine, lifestyle assistance, dialect conservation, and more.
As one of the first participants in the “A.I. company” project, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. uses the latest A.I. products and curriculums to improve educational quality in underdeveloped areas, providing care and help to “left-behind children.” In the past few years, under this project, it has donated more than eight million CNY and provided A.I.-enhanced educational products to more than forty schools. It also actively participates in awards for outstanding educators and financial assistance for excellent and/or underprivileged students.
We want to sow three seeds in the hearts of more children: a seed of science that enables them to enjoy the fruits of science and see the power of science; a seed of endeavor that instills them with the goal of changing their lives through knowledge and creating futures by their own hands; and a seed of happiness that puts joy into their education and upbringing.
In the area of medicine, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. endowed a charitable fund of ten million CNY as part of the first stage of its public interest plan. It went to remote mountainous areas and underdeveloped counties all over China, engaging in such activities as medical services, clinical sessions and preventative healthcare, and improving the level of healthcare through its A.I. technologies.
For impaired persons, dropout children, underprivileged groups and those afflicted by rare diseases, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. launched its charitable project of “the Trinity of Blessed Voices.” Mr. Chengchuan Shi, a hearing-impaired individual, participated in and benefited from this project.
His hearing was impaired when he was just eleven. Our charitable project reached him, and our technology was able to recognize correctly his pronunciations and convert them into writings through our speech-to-text products. Now, he is not only able to communicate effectively with others, but he has started his own entrepreneurial career, creating a software tool that helps hearing impaired individuals communicate face-to-face through subtitle-enabled video chats, which now has more than four hundred thousand users.
With a goal of “bettering life through science,” iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. bridges the chasm of communication between hearing and visually impaired individuals with its smart speech and A.I. technologies. Its speech recognition technologies enable hearing impaired individuals to “see” voice, and its speech synthesis technologies enable visually impaired individuals to “hear” text. The breaking down of barriers to communication for hearing and visually impaired individuals allows these individuals the opportunity to pursue their dreams so that they can realize their life goals.
Recognizing the importance of linguistic culture, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. launched the charitable project of “Dialect Conservation Plan”. This plan aims to preserve dialects through A.I. technologies, and facilitate the permanence of the world’s rich and complex dialects. The plan serves dialect-speaking users through iFLYTEK products and preserves those endangered dialects. As of today, the relevant products already cover ten dialect zones, with the ability to recognize 23 dialects, synthesize 11 dialects, and provide translation services of dialects such as Cantonese. Moreover, through the recruitment of dialect speakers, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. has enlisted the involvement of five hundred thousand dialect speakers, and with their help, has engaged in preservation and partial archiving of Sichuan Dialect, Wu Dialect and Cantonese.
“We firmly believe that languages belong both to the nations and to the world. We promote the conservation of linguistic resources in China and contribute to the conservation of cultural diversity in the world.”
iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. was founded by Mr. Qingfeng Liu, its current chairman of the board, in 1999, and it has kept its initial focus of smart speech and A.I. technologies ever since.
As the most convenient and natural communication method between people, speech will become a vital entrance point for every device and will present more value and functions. We will remove all obstacles to communication between human and machine, between human and human, this has been the dream of iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. throughout its 21 years of entrepreneurship and will remain so in the future.
In order to break down the communication barriers arising from linguistic differences, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. has been bringing smart speech technologies to real applications, helping with more international interactions, and aiming to eliminate communication barriers for all of mankind.
In 2016, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. launched its translator product. The current version of this product can translate between languages covering almost two hundred countries and regions. It supports many operating modes including specialized translation for various professions, off-line translation, photo translation, and dialect translation.
Mr. Jun Liu from China, in his sixties, embarked on his first travel abroad with an iFLYTEK Translator. From London to Paris, from Provence to Florence, and then to small Spanish towns, he was able to talk with the locals about food, customs and culture, making several friends in the course of his travels.
Mr. Gaston from France has a Chinese daughter-in-law, and he used to have a lot of trouble communicating with her family. Now, with the iFLYTEK Translator, his trouble is gone. “With this, I can communicate freely with her family, and when I am in China, I can shop in bakeries and engage in small talk in the neighborhood. I even hosted a French style Christmas party!”
People all over the world, like Mr. Liu and Mr. Gaston, enjoy the linguistic convenience provided by iFLYTEK Translator. iFLYTEK Translator has seen five hundred million instances of usage since its launch. Globalization is making the iFLYTEK Translator even more valuable and more people are using it every day for a variety of activities, including international business and social interactions.
In 2019, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. became the official exclusive provider of automatic speech transcription and translation services for the 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics that will be held in Beijing. “Our speech recognition, speech synthesis and machine translation products will serve friends from everywhere in the world.” Our mission to improve the world and bring it closer together is also furthered by UNESCO’s iFLYREC smart conference system, providing barrier-free communications for participants from different linguistic backgrounds at UNESCO hosted conferences.
True barrier-free communication requires learning languages and understanding cultures.
“Today the temperature will become lower, it is better to wear a little more.” In a Chinese-as-a-foreign-language classroom session held at the College of International Education, Anhui University, Mr. Zhou is teaching the usage of the phrase “一点儿” (“a little”) in colloquial Chinese. This classroom utilizes the Global Chinese Learning Platform, launched in October 2019.
This A.I.-enhanced language learning platform developed by iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. is available as a self-study solution to all people wishing to learn Chinese. It can help build a solid foundation of Chinese language understanding and improve day-to-day communication skills.
Miss Nikulina Kateryna, a foreign student from Ukraine, tried the “Chinese through translation” module and said: “There are four tones in Chinese, and the third tone is the most difficult to grasp for foreign students, and moreover there are many homophones in Chinese. Before, with only textbooks, it is difficult to remember everything, but now, thanks to this open and free platform, I can learn all the time and learn everywhere, as long as I have internet access. This is so convenient.”
Apart from learning Chinese, this platform also provides resources to learn about traditional Chinese culture, famous Chinese poems, and classical Chinese calligraphy. It makes Chinese cultural resources broadly available and brings the beauty of this culture to everyone through audios and videos.
With more and more of its technologies entering day-to-day application, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. believes that its A.I. research is starting to pay dividends. This is not only visible in its public interest pursuits, but also in its consumer products. The iFLYTEK A.I. note increases efficiency by keeping records of meetings, the iFLYTEK smart recorder frees you from complicated speech transcription tasks, and the iFLYTEK smart mouse enables you to handle typing and translation needs with your speech.
In the future, iFLYTEK Co. Ltd. will continue to adhere to its principles of openness and friendliness. It will continue to promote education and medicine with A.I. technologies, as well as to support linguistic and cultural communications and charitable projects.
