iFlytek Hires Ex-Microsoft Research Head to Lead AI Development

Dou Shicong

(Yicai Global) May 3 — China’s leading voice recognition firm iFlytek Co. has appointed Dr. Li Shipeng, a former executive at Microsoft Corp.’s Asia research unit, as vice president and co-director of artificial intelligence research.

He will lead the exploration of key AI technologies and help iFlytek put them into practice while forming international partnerships, science and tech news site TMT reported.

Li is an expert in signal and image processing and computer vision, and served as chief researcher and vice director at Microsoft Research Asia for 16 years after co-founding the unit in 1999. He has since worked as chief technology officer at Hong Kong-based telecoms hardware maker Cogobuy Group Plc and IngDan Technology Shenzhen Co., an innovation platform for the Internet of Things.

The appointment is iFlytek’s second of a former executive at a leading international firm in recent times. Last year, it hired Tao Xiangdong, ex-chief solutions architect at Koninklijke Philips NV, to head its smart healthcare unit.

Established in 2005, iFlytek’s AI research unit is a key development platform covering voice, voiceprint, facial and image recognition, natural language processing, voice interaction and machine translation.

Editor: James Boynton