China Speech Valley in Anhui province draws up a plan this May to take the "highland" of domestic intelligent speech industry in five years. [Photo by Yang Jie/VCG]

Five years on, China Speech Valley in East China's Anhui province has risen as an emerging local industrial trump card. 

On Dec 24, the valley infused new impetus to local artificial intelligence (AI) industry by unveiling a China Speech Valley Construction and Operation Center, a China Speech Valley Manufacturing Center, and a development fund for intelligence speech and AI industries. 

The manufacturing center, facilitated with product design, technical support, testing and inspection, and intelligent assembly departments, will provide one-stop services to enterprises settled in the valley, helping them to turn research results into practical applications more quickly. 

The development fund, featuring an initial round of 1 billion yuan ($145 million) from a total of 5 billion yuan, will target international projects that are of core innovative AI technologies, in keeping with the valley's development patterns, or have formed developed industrial chains. 

An AI industrial cluster has been taking shape in the valley, hosting over 400 giant companies like Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Unisound, Kingsoft and Ultrapower. 

"China Speech Valley is striving for an industrial cluster integrating technologies, products and industrial ecologic chains," said an official at the Anhui provincial department of economic and information.