Say Hello, or 你好, to China's Siri

You might not have heard of iFlyTek. The company is hardly a household name in its domestic market of China, either. But it has a vice-like grip on over 80 percent of the speech technology market in the People's Republic, heading an ecosystem of over 10,000 partners and developers and with user numbers in the hundreds of millions. The company was founded in 1999 by Liu Qingfeng and five other students from the University of Science and Technology of China, widely recognized as one of the nation's preëminent research institutions. They took advantage of research conducted at the university's National Intelligent Computer R&D Center and the Human-Machine Speech Communication Laboratory.