China’s iFlytek (科大讯飞) announced on 12 November that its SparkAudio 1.0 model is now available to developers through an application programming interface (API). The Chinese technology site IT Home (IT之家) reported the news the same day.

SparkAudio 1.0 is a foundation model for speech: a model trained on a broad dataset and used as the basis for many tasks. It belongs to iFlytek’s Spark model series (讯飞星火). The model accepts speech and text as input and responds in text.

The company says the model can transcribe speech, translate between languages and recognise dialects and ambient sounds. It also separates speakers, analyses emotions and answers complex questions about an audio recording.

iFlytek says the model interprets speech directly, not via text

iFlytek’s case for the model is that audio has usually been processed in a pipeline. Speech is first converted into text, and only then does a large language model interpret it. Text, the company said, keeps only the words; tone of voice, emotion and background sounds are lost. Errors easily accumulate from one stage to the next, and latency builds up when transcription, speaker identification and translation run as separate components.

SparkAudio 1.0 does not merely convert speech into text but interprets it directly, the company said. It recognises speech, ambient sounds and music in one pass, together with their meaning, emotion and situation.

iFlytek says the model supports 99 languages and 202 dialects. The claim is the company’s own. The reports give no accuracy figures and do not list the supported languages, so support for Finnish, for example, must be checked separately.

The company lists customer service, car cockpits, multilingual meetings, patient records and content moderation as use cases. It says the model was trained entirely on domestic, that is Chinese, computing capacity.

Details come from the company; API available on developer platform

An article by the Chinese IT news site IT时代网, published on Tencent News, reports the same details. By its own account, it was compiled from IT Home and other sources, partly with the help of AI, so it does not independently confirm iFlytek’s claims.

The API is available on iFlytek’s developer platform, iFlytek Open Platform (xfyun.cn), and the model can be tried on the company’s website. The reports do not give a price.