iFlytek partners with Venucia for intelligent vehicles

Chinese speech recognition firm iFlytek's technology will be available on more of Dongfeng Venucia's vehicles, as the two companies reached a strategic partnership Tuesday.

The cooperation will be focused on integration, not only of speech recognition technology, but also Internet of Vehicles technology and vehicle designing and manufacturing. The partnership was announced in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, where iFlytek is headquartered.

An independent company spun off from Dongfeng Nissan's China developed brand, Venucia has been strengthening its position by developing an IoV network through cooperation with multiple partners, according to Ma Lei, deputy general manager of Dongfeng Venucia.

"As a leader in speech recognition technology, iFlytek has been seeking to step up integration of its technology with vehicle makers," said Liu Junfeng, chief of iFlytek's intelligent vehicle business sector.

The strategic partnership is based on a two-year history of fruitful cooperation.

"Cooperation between the two partners started in 2016, and since then iFlytek's speech recognition technology has been adopted on Venucia's models D60 and T70," said Wu Xiaoru, executive president of iFlytek.

"Since the launch of the D60 in 2017, 96 percent of the vehicles of this model have adopted artificial intelligence technology and 84 percent of them have access to the internet," Ma said.

Tao Kun and Yang Xiao contributed to this story.