iFlytek's upgraded AI model 'better than GPT-4 Turbo' in 3 areas

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) service provider iFlytek on Tuesday released an upgraded version of its "Spark" large AI model, which the company said can perform better than the GPT-4 Turbo product from U.S. rival OpenAI in math, understanding language and voice interaction.

The Hefei-based company worked with tech giant Huawei to create a new AI platform called "Feixing-1" with domestic hardware in October 2023. The new Spark v3.5 model was the "brainchild" of the new platform with over 90 days of training time.

"Our dream and mission have never changed during our company's 25-year history," said Liu Qingfeng, founder and president of iFlytek, at the release of the new model. "We want to realize barrier-free communications."

"Large models are a new chance for the development of voice technologies," he added.

Liu said the new AI technology can help make synthesized voices with different emotions, tones and rhythm, adding that iFlytek's voice model is "world-leading."

According to iFlytek's own testing, the new AI model's voice-recognition functions perform better than OpenAI's Whisper V3 in 37 languages including English, Chinese, French and Russian.