companies
iFlytek
Chinese speech-AI pioneer known for its Spark large language model and the country's most widely used voice-to-text keyboard app.
Founded in 1999 in Hefei, Anhui by Liu Qingfeng and a group of University of Science and Technology of China researchers, iFlytek built its reputation on Mandarin and dialect speech recognition long before generative AI became mainstream. It's publicly listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and partially owned by China Mobile. The company unveiled its Spark (Xinghuo) large language model in 2023 and has since folded it into products spanning education, healthcare, automotive, and government, including a dedicated medical-focused Spark variant developed with its Xunfei Healthcare subsidiary. In 2024 iFlytek opened an international headquarters in Hong Kong to expand outside mainland China. iFlytek remains best known to ordinary Chinese consumers through its input method keyboard app, one of the most downloaded productivity apps in the country, rather than through its LLM work, which competes for attention against Baidu, Alibaba, and DeepSeek.
- Founded
- 1999
- Headquarters
- Hefei, China
- Sector
- lab
Tools
- iFlytek Input Method
iFlytek Input Method is a Chinese keyboard for mobile and desktop devices with speech input, personalized dictionaries, skins, emojis, and dialect features.
- iFlytek Spark (Xinghuo)
iFlytek Spark is an AI assistant for answering questions, reading documents, writing, coding, image generation, and multimodal chat.