During the recent World University Games in Chengdu – capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province – a special humanoid "volunteer" named Xiao Fu captured the hearts and imagination of visitors.

It was created by iFlytek, a publicly listed company engaged in intelligent speech and artificial intelligence and helped out at the games, also known as the Chengdu Universiade.

Hello! iFlytek's Xiao Fu gets ready to swing into action. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

As a member of the volunteer team called the "Little Green Pepper," Xiao Fu utilized iFlytek's advanced technologies such as facial recognition, AI lip-syncing and image processing – together with the iFlytek Star Model – to engage in face-to-face interactions with the folks, while also being able to chat, write poetry and even plan travel itineraries.

iFlytek, a company based in the Hefei High-tech Industry Development Zone of Hefei – capital of East China's Anhui province – was the exclusive supplier of automatic speech conversion and translation services for the Chengdu Universiade.

Two of iFlytek's intelligent translation products are put in position at the games. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The company has launched intelligent hardware such as the iFlytek Smart Screen, iFlytek Translation Device and the iFlytek Intelligent Microphone.

It also provided software services – like the iFlytek Intelligent Conference System, Intelligent Voice Broadcast and iFlytek Simultaneous Interpretation – to ensure support for conference management, guest receptions, volunteer services, media interviews and barrier-free communications for the visually impaired.

With the assistance of new technologies – like neural network machine translations, speech recognition, semantic understanding, speech synthesis and four-microphone arrays – these devices provide online translations, text conversions and speech synthesis services in 83 languages.