Chinese speech recognition company iFlytek has unveiled a new chatbot called SparkDesk at a public event. CEO Liu Qingfeng demonstrated SparkDesk’s capabilities in education and enterprise, stating that the goal is to surpass OpenAI in Chinese and meet the standards of ChatGPT in English. During the presentation, students evaluated essays and wrote hypothetical stories about Confucius participating in the Beijing Olympics using the chatbot. The audience also had the opportunity to ask questions during the event.
Liu believes that the impact of generative AI technology is just as important as the invention of the personal computer or the internet and that iFlytek must strive to learn from ChatGPT and even surpass it. iFlytek’s entry into the race to build a ChatGPT competitor comes just after China released draft guidelines on security testing of generative AI services. The draft includes guidelines for curbing output critical of the regime and “truthful and accurate” AI models.
However, there are concerns about the long-term supply of Chinese companies with high-end chips required for large-scale language models. iFlytek has been on the US government’s blacklist since 2019, along with other Chinese companies, making it difficult to purchase components from the USA. This ban was a result of US foreign policy interests with regards to the surveillance of the Uyghurs.
iFlytek is a Chinese AI company that applies deep learning to speech recognition, speech processing, machine translation, and data mining. Its “iFlytek Input” app, which translates Chinese into English via voice input, was used by 500 million people in 2017. With SparkDesk, iFlytek is competing with other language models, such as Ernie from Baidu and Tongyi Qianwen from Alibaba, in its own country.
