“China’s AI Advances Help Its Tech Industry, and State Security”, 2017-12-03 (; backlinks; similar):
During President Trump’s visit to Beijing, he appeared on screen for a special address at a tech conference. First he spoke in English. Then he switched to Mandarin Chinese. Mr. Trump doesn’t speak Chinese. The video was a publicity stunt, designed to show off the voice capabilities of iFlytek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company with both innovative technology and troubling ties to Chinese state security. IFlyTek has said its technology can monitor a car full of people or a crowded room, identify a targeted individual’s voice and record everything that person says.
“IFlyTek”, the image of Mr. Trump said in Chinese, “is really fantastic.”
As China tests the frontiers of artificial intelligence, iFlyTek serves as a compelling example of both the country’s sci-fi ambitions and the technology’s darker dystopian possibilities.
The Chinese company uses sophisticated AI to power image and voice recognition systems that can help doctors with their diagnoses, aid teachers in grading tests and let drivers control their cars with their voices. Even some global companies are impressed: Delphi, a major American auto supplier, offers iFlyTek’s technology to carmakers in China, while Volkswagen plans to build the Chinese company’s speech recognition technology into many of its cars in China next year. At the same time, iFlyTek hosts a laboratory to develop voice surveillance capabilities for China’s domestic security forces. In an October report, a human rights group said the company was helping the authorities compile a biometric voice database of Chinese citizens that could be used to track activists and others…“The Chinese government has been collecting the voice patterns of tens of thousands of people with little transparency about the program or laws regulating who can be targeted or how that information is going to be used”, Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director, wrote in a report in October. In its home province of Anhui, iFlyTek has assembled a database of 70,000 voice patterns, according to the report, which also said that the police had begun collecting records of voice patterns as they would fingerprints. The report cited as one example 3 women suspected of being sex workers whose voices were registered in a database, it said, in part because they had been arrested in Anhui. The local Chinese media has also reported about a new plan in Anhui to scan voice calls automatically for the voice-prints of wanted criminals, and alert the police if they are detected. IFlyTek did not respond to requests for comment on the Human Rights Watch report but has said its data-gathering efforts will not stop, particularly as it participates in China’s push to develop self-driving cars. “We are always talking about big data—the vehicle produces many images every day”, said Mr. Liu, the iFlyTek automotive executive.