companies

iFlytek

Pioniere cinese dell’IA vocale, noto per il suo modello linguistico di grandi dimensioni Spark e per l’app di tastiera per la conversione da voce a testo più usata nel Paese.

In inglese

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