How a Chinese AI Giant Made Chatting—and Surveillance—Easy
Alexa can tell you the weather. Siri knows a few jokes. In China, voice-computing company iFlytek built similar smart assistants beloved by users. But its tech is also helping the government listen in.
iFlytek's virtual assistants are often called “China's Siri,” but Xing thought that comparison did the company a disservice. “With Siri, you have to say ‘Hey, Siri’ every time,” she told me. “It's very mechanical.” In the US, companies like Apple have fought hard against the perception that their devices are always listening. In China, though, it was a selling point. “You only have to wake it up one time, and then it's awake,” Xing said of Flying Fish.
Others speculate that the Chinese government intends to build the iFLYTEK AI and related AIs into their telecom infrastructure so they can monitor voice and text conversations in all languages in near real time.