Liu Qingfeng, founder of iFlytek, says his mission is to bring voice recognition technologies out of laboratories at the World Robot Conference in 2018. [Photo/VCG]

Liu's mission to bring voice recognition technologies out of laboratories has been a long one. Almost no one believed he could succeed. In the late 1990s, the China market for voice recognition technologies was dominated by US companies such as IBM and Microsoft Corp.

Liu and his colleagues seemed to have nothing but a passion to learn and do something.

Then 26, Liu got a few of his university mates together and raised a seed fund from the university to found iFlytek. Soon, he realized being a scientist and an entrepreneur are two fundamentally different things.

"When I was engaged in scientific research, I would bury myself in books and experiments, ignoring everybody else. But as an entrepreneur, I can't be so capricious," Liu said. "When meeting someone better than me, I can't just think of beating him or her. Instead, if they are the best people I could recruit, I must be kind to them, encourage them, and help them grow."

The seasoned executive now often refers to himself as a "mother" who is on a night journey with a string of children. "The road ahead may be fraught with traps, pitfalls and people who want to cheat you. While walking on this unknown road, I must protect the kids following me."

iFlytek realized the voice computing sector is set for explosive growth, thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning algorithms. Even as it made headway, BAT, or Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, the triumvirate of Chinese internet-based businesses, forayed into the segment, giving it stiff competition in voice computing and strategic voice interaction.

"iFlytek's biggest edge lies in our 19 years of consistent input into the research and development of original technologies. No matter how innovative others are branding their technologies as, they must put them in commercial applications," Liu said.

Currently, iFlytek accounts for 70 percent of China's market in voice-based technologies, according to data from the Speech Industry Alliance of China. Its voice assistant technology is the Siri of China, and its real-time portable translator puts AI to remarkable use, overcoming dialect, slang, and background noise to translate between Chinese and 33 other languages with high accuracy.

The company is also leveraging its technology repertoire to branch out into other AI-enabled sectors. It is developing an AI-enabled system to assist courts in reviewing four types of cases, namely murder, theft, telecom fraud and illegal fundraising.

Its medical robot also has passed the written test of China's national medical licensing examination in November last year. Now, it is being applied to hospitals in Anhui province to function as a general practitioner and help doctors treat diseases.

Its AI-system has also been applied in classrooms of primary and middle schools across the country to help teachers better educate students.

Liu is the director of the National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing, part-time professor and PhD supervisor at the University of Science and Technology of China, deputy to the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th National People's Congress, first chairman of the National College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Alliance, and chairman of the Speech Industry Alliance of China.

Liu has also won honors including the "National Science and Technology Progress Award", "China Youth May 4th Medal", "CCTV China Economic Person of the Year", and "Top 100 Outstanding Private Entrepreneurs in 40 Years of Reform and Opening Up".