CNBC AI News – July 29 – China’s iFlytek is making waves in the multilingual AI arena. At a recent international academic symposium, Liu Cong, Head of iFlytek Research, announced a significant upgrade to the Spark Large Model (X1). The X1 now boasts support for over 130 languages, with Liu stating that key languages like Arabic, German, French, Korean, and Japanese demonstrate performance surpassing that of GPT-4.1.
Leveraging innovative technologies such as hybrid language routing, the Spark voice model delivers high-precision speech recognition in 100 languages – outperforming Whisper V3, according to the company – and speech synthesis in 55 languages, with industry-leading naturalness and fluency.
Looking ahead, iFlytek’s multilingual large model development will focus on three key areas, according to Liu: first, the fusion of “voice + text” multimodal data to break down semantic barriers between different modalities. Second, constructing a native multilingual speech large model foundation to strengthen the model’s understanding of the global language ecosystem at a fundamental level. And third, developing cross-language knowledge transfer technologies, enabling knowledge sharing between languages through generalization, providing crucial support for global AI applications.
iFlytek’s multilingual technology is already powering 120 million smart devices for major Chinese companies like Huawei, BYD, and Haier, across 23 languages. This technology is seeing significant deployment in regions like Africa and Southeast Asia, serving as a critical component in the global expansion of “Made in China” products.
On the technology ecosystem front, iFlytek has opened up 813 AI capability interfaces to 530,000 developers worldwide. Of these, 272 are specifically tailored for multilingual needs, covering core scenarios such as speech recognition, machine translation, and cross-language interaction, fostering global AI technology collaboration and innovation.
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