Si Wei

Si Wei is the Vice President of iFlytek Research and Development Institute and also the leader of iFlytek’s “Hyper Brain Program." This program refers to making machines “shift from being able to read and hear to being able to understand and think." It aims to realize the intelligent cognitive engine based on human-like neural networks, i.e. create the first Chinese intelligent cognitive computing engine in the world.

Based on the Hyper Brain Program, iFlytek is launching a “cognitive revolution” with speech and language as entrance. During the past 6 years, iFlytek’s speech recognition accuracy has increased from 60.2％ to over 95％. The improvement of accuracy is owed to a “brand new weapon” for speech recognition developed by Wei’s team—a new frame called Feed-forward Sequential Memory Network. According to Wei, compared to traditional deep learning models, the Feed-forward Sequential Memory Network added a “memory block” model to store history and future information, which is used to make judgments on speech frame to realize “end to end” modeling in speech recognition. Combined with several techniques, iFlytek’s speech recognition frame based on FSMN yielded a dramatic increase in performance. This new model shortened response time significantly, e.g. from originally one week to currently one day, and improved training effects.

Wei is convinced that “this is a great era.” Wei and his team at iFlytek hope to turn iFlytek Research and Development Institute into a world renowned one, cultivate top-notch scientists, and solve some fundamental scientific problems. Wei said, “In the next 10 or 20 years, we will have touched the essence of intelligence and unveiled the mystery of wisdom.”