When it comes to China's advancements in artificial intelligence, iFLYTEK -- famous for its intelligent speech technologies -- is often considered the best example. But few people know the company's success has a lot to do with its ongoing collaboration with universities and research institutes. CGTN's Xu Mengqi visited iFLYTEK's headquarters in Hefei and files this report.

You are looking at a demonstration of how appliances that understand human speech are making homes smarter.

It's one example of artificial intelligence voice technologies being put to use in real life.

And in China, few do it better than iFLYTEK.

LI SHIPENG, GROUP VICE PRESIDENT IFLYTEK CO., LTD "We have daily user interaction about 4.5 billion times, that means so many different users are using our service. We are very focused on technology. Our key leadership members and key technical staff are all trained researchers from the very beginning."

The "beginning" was back in 1999, when a few research fellows from a speech processing lab at the University of Science and Technology of China graduated and founded iFLYTEK.

The company now has over 8,000 employees and offices in all major Chinese cities. But its headquarters still sits in Hefei, not far from the university where it all started.

XU MENGQI HEFEI, ANHUI "iFLYTEK says it has always maintained a close relationship with the University of Science and Technology of China, even after the company was founded. In fact, a lot of iFLYTEK's voice-technology breakthroughs happened right here, at the lab jointly established by the company and the university."

ZHENG RUI, POSTGRADUATE UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF CHINA "Before actual products are developed, we run experiments at the lab to optimize their algorithms. For example, the Dingdong speaker, it wants to receive only human voices and eliminate noise from the environment. Here we have two mics, one plays the signal we want, the other plays unwanted noise. We run algorithms on the computer to calculate where the target signal comes from, and then augment it."

Ling Zhenhua is one of the professors leading the research on intelligent speech and language processing at the lab.

LING ZHENHUA, VICE PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF CHINA "The company also has their own researchers, but what they do is more directly related to the business. At the lab we deal with issues that are more fundamental, more at the frontiers of artificial intelligence."

The solutions for these issues have proved rewarding for iFLYTEK.

Back at its headquarters, dozens of groups arrive every day, looking for potential business cooperation.

LI SHIPENG, GROUP VICE PRESIDENT IFLYTEK CO., LTD "Now actually we are really looking into what the next framework for artificial intelligence will be, so we work with not only universities in China, but also universities around the world."

And such a collaboration, Li Shipeng says, will put iFLYTEK another step ahead in the fierce competition over artificial intelligence technologies.

XMQ, CGTN, Hefei, Anhui province.