According to an announcement from speech recognition software company iFlyTek, China Mobile has just purchased fifteen percent of iFlyTek via one of China Mobile’s subsidiary companies. The stock buy totaled 70,270,000 shares at 19.4 RMB ($3.07) per share, meaning that the buy cost a total of more than 1.3 billion RMB (more than $200 million). That’s not chump change, even for a company as massive as China Mobile.
Readers may recall iFlyTek from Xiaomi’s recent M2 announcement; iFlyTek’s voice-recognition technology is powering Xiaomi’s new Siri-like voice assistant. China Mobile clearly has similar plans, as it has also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with iFlyTek that will see the two companies working on a variety of voice-recognition including apparent integration with China Mobile’s upcoming cloud service. China Mobile has also appointed a dependent board member to iFlyTek’s board.
Voice recognition is clearly getting big in China, but any company attempting to serve the entire country faces a host of problems. China’s dialects and accents can vary quite widely by region, making speech recognition something of a nightmare. Although it’s easy to see what China Mobile may be getting out of this iFlyTek deal, and iFlyTek has quite obviously gotten an awful lot of money out of it, as China’s largest telecom, it’s likely that China Mobile can also offer iFlyTek speech samples and other data about its subscribers across the country that could help develop more effective speech recognition. I should make it clear: I have no idea whether or not China Mobile and iFlyTek are cooperating in that way to enhance the effectiveness of iFlyTek’s tech. But if they’re not, they probably should be.
Either way, we may see the first effects of this cooperation when China Mobile rolls out its cloud service later this year. What, exactly, it will look like isn’t yet clear, but if you enjoy talking to your phone, my guess is that when it comes out, you’re probably going to like it.
[via Sina Tech]
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