National AI champion iFlytek in dispute over ‘automated’ speech translation at Shanghai forum

Chinese voice recognition technology provider iFlytek was drawn into a dispute with an interpreter working at a recent high-profile conference, who accused it of passing off his translation as something done entirely by artificial intelligence (AI), an accusation that the company denies.

Shenzhen-listed iFlytek said it has the technology to do simultaneous translation without need for human interpreters, but the service it provided at the 2018 International Forum on Innovation and Emerging Industries Development in Shanghai last week was for real-time transcription and billed as such.

The controversy went viral in China on Friday, following a post on the Quora-like question-and-answer platform Zhihu, where the interpreter Bell Wang accused the company of “stealing” his transcript at the conference and labelling it as the result provided by a live machine translation.

“It was an outright lie,” Wang wrote in his Zhihu post on Friday. “The day may come when AI can actually understand natural languages and we lose our jobs, but it’s definitely not now.”

In a post on Monday amid the speculation surrounding the dispute, Wang wrote that an iFlytek manager had reached out to him to explain that the conference used the company’s transcription service, which combined machine and human translation, and not its AI-based simultaneous translation system.