AI soon to be used daily: iFLYTEK's Liu Qingfeng

Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK [Photo by Guo Yiming/China.org.cn]

A string of amazing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) has provided conditions for its application in daily use, said the helmsman behind China's industry frontrunner on March 5.

"The ever-evolving AI technologies combined with big data and industrial expertise will definitely change how people work and live in the next five to 10 years," said Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK and a deputy of the National People's Congress (NPC), during an exclusive interview with China.org.cn in Beijing.

In his annual government work report delivered on March 5, Premier Li Keqiang expressed the government's steadfast support for emerging industries, saying that the country "will accelerate R&D on and commercialization of new materials, artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, bio-pharmacy, 5G mobile communications and other technologies."

Chinese leaders are quite far-sighted in placing AI development at a strategic level, as the frontier industry is currently at a key stage of cut-throat competition, Liu said.

AI's rise to the spotlight came after AlphaGo, Google's computer program, defeated the world's Go champion Lee Sedol in a historic five-game match last year, which wowed the world and prompted many established companies and startups to bet on the infant sector.

The country's top three internet giants -- Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent -- (known as the BAT) have already announced their plans while pumping in huge amounts of money into the technology of the future.

Looking outside of China, almost all tech giants like Apple, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook have joined the game.

"With various core technologies on hand, massive databases, China's huge market as well as specializations in AI and voice recognition, iFLYTEK will definitely stand at the front line of the ever-growing market," said Liu. He cited the company's glorious victories over foreign rivals on multiple occasions including speech separation and recognition competition CHiME (Computational Hearing in Multisource Environments) and the translation competition Blizzard Challenge.

The Shenzhen-listed company is developing a robot that will seek to beat 80 percent of Chinese students and become eligible, theoretically, for admission into a top-level university in 2020.

AI technologies have already applied and will continue to expand their presence in education, translation, healthcare, information services, security, smart homes and others, he explained.

"Chinese people are estimated to have made over 120 million overseas trips in 2016," Liu quoted from the premier's government work report. "Increasing outbound travel comes with people's increasing need for basic translation services in shopping, ordering food and asking for directions."

With state-of-the-art technology in voice recognition, text translation and speech synthesis, the real-time translation device innovated by iFLYTEK can make cross-language communication available between Chinese and English, mandarin and Uygur as well as mandarin and Tibetan, he said.

In the future, AI will replace over 50 percent of jobs and create new employment opportunities at the same time, said Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi Inc. He thinks that AI will create a new technology revolution and become basic social elements just like the internet in the coming years.