iFlyrec, a sub-brand of Chinese speech recognition company iFlytek, demonstrated its new AI-powered product — iFlyrec AI Writer — on Wednesday at the BEYOND Expo 2023 in Macao. 

Why it matters: iFlytek is following in the footsteps of Chinese tech majors Baidu and Alibaba in releasing its own AI language models and related applications, continuing Chinese tech companies’ contribution to the global AI development drive ignited by ChatGPT. 

Details: The iFlyrec AI Writer is an artificial intelligence writing tool that helps people quickly produce articles based on provided materials and prompts. The product was first launched at iFlytek’s May 6 press release event.  

  • iFlyrec, the sub-brand as a whole, focuses on speech-to-text transcription; this newly launched AI writing product focuses on providing AI writing, rewriting, smart summarization, language polishing and proofreading, multi-language translation of text, and keyword extraction. It can be used in various writing scenarios, such as news writing, official document writing, marketing promotion, and project planning.
  • On Wednesday, Wang Wei, vice president of iFlytek and general manager of iFlyrec, demonstrated at the BEYOND Expo product release event that on day of the product launch (May 6), some media outlets were able to produce a complete news articles using the AI writing tool. They uploaded a 15-minute voice recording that was around 5,000 words long, and the tool generated a news article of around 500 words. 

Context: iFlyrec relies on iFlytek’s AI speech recognition tech for its products and services. The latter has been making moves to demonstrate its AI capability in recent weeks. On Monday, iFlytek launched an AI language model called SparkDesk. Liu Qingfeng, iFlytek’s chairman said at a May 6 product release event that the model has surpassed ChatGPT in Chinese long-text generation, medical knowledge, and mathematical abilities, but still lags behind ChatGPT in natural language understanding.

  • Liu added that the model will have three upgrades in the near future. On June 9, the model will increase its capabilities in answering open-ended questions, multi-round dialogue, and mathematical ability, and on August 15, it will be improved with code and multimodal interaction abilities. He further stated that by October 24, the model will surpass ChatGPT’s current level in Chinese, while becoming equal to ChatGPT’s current level in English.
  • Founded in 1999, iFlytek is a leading Chinese technology company specializing in voice recognition and AI. The firm has become one of the largest providers of intelligent speech and language technologies globally, focusing on developing voice recognition and natural language processing solutions. Some of iFlytek’s most popular products include voice assistants, speech-to-text translation software, and smart recorders.