On 27 November, Liu Qingfeng, Chairman of iFlytek Co., Ltd., delivered a keynote speech titled “Three Trends in AI Technology that Will Usher in a New Era for Asia” at the Asia Youth Leaders Forum 2021.

The full speech is as below.

We gather here today to discuss the new future of Asia and how our young friends can strengthen cooperation and work together to promote a better and shared future with common destiny. I want to share with you three important trends regarding the new future of Asia brought by AI technology:

The first trend is that AI technology will undoubtedly build the Tower of Babel for human languages in the coming 14th Five-Year Plan period and the next decade, promoting better communication and exchange between Asian youth. It should be said that only mutual communication and a deep understanding of languages can promote better cooperation and a win-win situation. Today's progress of AI technology has enabled our machine translation to pass the China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters and surpass 99% of candidates of the CET-6 examination which is designed for graduate students. I want to tell you that this is definitely not just for Chinese. There are now more than 60 languages, covering 200 countries and regions worldwide. Just one week ago, in a global multilingual speech recognition competition organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), iFlytek won the first place in the world in all 15 languages, which I think is a pride for iFlytek and also a pride for our Asian technology. Because of the progress of this technology, I think the Tower of Babel for human languages that we have been pursuing will be built in the future. It will better promote a new future of Asia, a new future with greater mutual trust, better communication and cooperation, and more prosperity.

Secondly, the latest advances in AI technology will drive Asia's education and health care, two of the most relevant livelihood issues, to a whole new level. Our dream at iFlytek is to build a better world with AI by making machines not only listen and speak but also understand and think like humans. In terms of machine understanding and thinking, in the past two years, we have enabled machines to surpass the human average in English in the world's most authoritative machine-reading comprehension competition, the SQuAD challenge by Stanford University. Thus, machines are able to acquire knowledge in various fields.

When talking about the pandemic prevention and control as well as the primary medical care to which we are paying particular attention, our machine has passed China's Qualification Examination for Medical Practitioners, surpassing 96.3% of the people who took the exam. For your information, the full score of the examination is 600, the passing score being 360, and only half of the medical graduates with a few years of working experience pass the exam. This means that the machine has the potential of a general practitioner for the first time in the world. Such a system has already gone through a critical process in China, from technology to product pilot and large-scale applications. It has been applied in 240 counties and districts in China now and provided assistance to the diagnosis and treatment of 280 million residents at the grassroots level, without changing any practicing habits of grassroots doctors. When it detects a potential misjudgment of a human doctor, the AI will remind the doctor. Suppose the human doctor thinks it is hypertension while the AI thinks it is a cerebral infarction. In that case, the AI will prompt the differences between hypertension and cerebral infarction and what should be asked again and what should be checked of the patient. 

For example, in Anhui alone, it has been used in all village doctors' clinics, township health centers, and community hospitals regularly. It has revised the initial diagnosis of 970,000 patients last year, saving many lives and a large number of medical insurance costs and, at the same time, improving the doctors' diagnosis and treatment abilities with each patient. In the past, such training is hard to be personalized. Now, this kind of system has already been used in Nansha District. The machine can automatically determine 6 major syndromes and 44 statutory infectious diseases on this basis. When grassroots doctors do not discover the cause, AI will be able to discern a certain major infectious disease and initiate early warning, so that we can actually establish the multi-point trigger and intelligent prevention and control system for major diseases as well as pandemic, as stated by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Therefore, during the lockdown of Wuhan, we used AI voice technology coupled with the medical capability to fight against COVID-19. We used a machine instead of hundreds or thousands of people to do telephone screening of families. The screening of 1 million households was finished in 6 hours. After the Korean version went live in Daegu, Korea, it was promoted throughout Korea. I think such technology can improve both the ability of treatment at the grassroots level and the ability to prevent and control infectious diseases, bringing a new and different future for the health of Asian people.

Then, education. Today, the recent progress of our cognitive intelligence technology can accurately pinpoint the weaknesses of children in mathematics, science, and chemistry, thereby providing customized teaching according to their needs and reducing the amount of time spent on ineffective repetitive learning. The composition correction is more accurate than humans. The machine has surpassed the human not only in the Chinese subject of China’s college entrance examination, but also the IELTS English speaking and English composition. This means that children in the most remote areas can get the same AI-empowered education as the children in developed cities. The inter-generational transmission of poverty can be interrupted, and a new future through education can be guaranteed for each child and each family. I think the success of these technologies is not only limited to China. We will empower the whole Asia with such applications.

Third. In addition to livelihood issues such as education and healthcare, AI also lends a new help to the overall digital balance, the vulnerable, and the technology for the elderly. Elderly people are not used to applications, and due to poor sight, they have difficulties in interacting with applications. However, they can talk and make calls such as 12345. AI can help with the care for elderly people who live alone, including ordering food, calling a taxi, or making hospital registrations online. It can also imitate the voice of their children to read books, newspapers, and stories to them at home. For deaf people, AI can transform the text to voice. For blind people, AI can read the text out loud. That's why Beijing Winter Olympic Games looked for automatic voice conversion and translation providers. iFlytek is honored to be the exclusive provider. We will create the first Olympic Games with barrier-free information communication in human history. We believe that the progress of AI technology will usher every special group, every vulnerable group, and every in-need group in a warmer future.

Of course, artificial intelligence can play a crucial role in more and more areas in industrial empowerment, whether in manufacturing, industrial management, sales, or quality control. It can be said that China's future and industrial strengths must rely on artificial intelligence, and the future happiness and industrial power of Asia must rely on artificial intelligence as well. This technology is definitely not something a single leading enterprise can do, and there must be an open ecosystem. iFlytek has authorized the use of more than 400 AI capabilities to entrepreneurs around the world. In October last year, the number of our developer teams was 1.57 million. This October, it has reached 2.65 million, adding 1.08 million real-name certified developer teams in one year, equivalent to an increase of 90,000 developer teams every month, which has formed a good ecosystem. We believe that Asian youth will have more space of cooperation in industry, livelihood, and poverty alleviation within this ecosystem. We also look forward to more comprehensive cooperation in data governance, data security, privacy protection, ethics, and artificial intelligence. I look forward to seeing youth work together, so that in the era of the digital economy when AI is profoundly changing the way of production and life, we, the youth of Asia, can lead globally and unite and cooperate to create a new and better future for Asia.