Ren Lihua, deputy director of the Department of Information and Software Service at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, speaks at the meeting. [Photo/people.com.cn]

The annual meeting of the Speech Industry Alliance of China (SIAC) was held in Shanghai between Nov 29 and 30. The SIAC released China's Speech Industry Development Declaration on site. 

Speech technology is the earliest subarea of artificial intelligence that has been industrialized; China's speech industry has made remarkable achievements in terms of industrial scale, innovation ability, business strength, and social impact, said Ren Lihua, deputy director of the Department of Information and Software Service at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, at the meeting. 

Wang Houliang, deputy director of the Anhui Provincial Economic and Information Department, spoke about Anhui province's strong support for Hefei's China Speech Valley, the country's only industrial base dedicated to speech technologies. 

To integrate industrial resources and optimize industrial structures, 19 of the most influential companies in the speech technology area, including iFlyTek, Huawei, Lenovo, China Mobile, and China Telecom, co-established the SIAC in 2012, under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. iFlyTek, headquartered in the Hefei National High-Tech Industry Development Zone, has been repeatedly elected to be the council president of the SIAC ever since.