On October 22, the AI Entertainment Forum of the 2026 iFLYTEK Global 1024 Developer Festival was held in Beijing. With the theme "Boundless Smart Entertainment • Let Dreams Speak," the forum focused on the product and content changes brought by AI technology, shared the latest progress of iFLYTEK AI Entertainment in music marketing, digital content, and other areas, released new AI trendy toy products and iFLYTEK Input Method 16.0, and discussed new possibilities for expression, creation, and companionship with partners.
Yan Yalu, Vice President of iFLYTEK, and Cheng Kun, Executive President of iFLYTEK AI Entertainment Business Group, attended the conference; Guo Jia, General Manager of iFLYTEK Music, Lu Jie, Deputy General Manager of iFLYTEK Input Method and Head of IP Business, Shao Zhen, General Manager of iFLYTEK Digital Entertainment Business Department, Wan Genshun, Director of Speech R&D at iFLYTEK AI Research Institute, and Zhao Minglu, Product Director of iFLYTEK Input Method, respectively introduced related business and product progress.
Opening with Song, Discussing New Possibilities for AI Entertainment
The forum opened with a performance by artists under iFLYTEK Music. The singing connected the guests on site and also opened the prelude to themed sharing centered on expression, creation, and companionship.
In his opening remarks, Cheng Kun, Executive President of iFLYTEK AI Entertainment Business Group, said that AI brings personalization and emotionalization to products, allowing users to define products with a low threshold, while products can also understand users' immediate needs and give natural and thoughtful responses. In terms of content, AI helps creators improve efficiency and devote more time to creativity, but technological progress cannot replace creators' creativity and professional judgment.
He said, "The ultimate meaning of our business is to make expression more convenient, make creativity easier to realize, and help good content build longer-lasting connections with users. Our vision is to become a globally leading entertainment IP operator."
Good Voices Have Their Echoes: iFLYTEK Music Aspires to Be a Talent Scout for Musicians and a Booster for Good Content
Guo Jia, General Manager of iFLYTEK Music, delivered a keynote speech titled "Good Voices Have Their Echoes," sharing with industry partners, musicians, and media representatives present the thoughts and practices of iFLYTEK Music over the past year in music marketing, ecosystem building, and AI efficiency improvement.
Guo Jia said that in the AI era, there are more creators and songs, but making songs "heard" has become increasingly difficult. Around song marketing, an endeavor long regarded as carrying a touch of "mysticism," iFLYTEK Music has developed a song promotion methodology of "marketing upfront + data-driven + AI empowerment + matrix collaboration," using transferable and replicable capabilities to leverage more "good luck."
Over the past year, more than 100 songs from iFLYTEK Music have charted, ranking among the top in the industry in terms of charting scale. Among them, the single "Jia Yi Bing Ding (How Do You and I Settle)," for which iFLYTEK Music was responsible for promotion and marketing, topped the hot song charts on three platforms within just one month of release, with peak daily plays exceeding 10 million and cumulative short video plays exceeding 3 billion, becoming a phenomenal hit song of 2026.
iFLYTEK Music has now built four major segments: song marketing, artist marketing, performance marketing, and variety show marketing, forming a full business chain covering "content creation — copyright operation — marketing promotion — offline implementation."
In variety show marketing, iFLYTEK Music has successively collaborated on music variety shows such as "Music Fate Plan 2," "Sound Comes 3," and "Music Show 2026•X Stage," driving more than 100 program songs onto mainstream platform hot song charts; in performance marketing, iFLYTEK Music has served leading music festival IPs such as Taihu Bay Music Festival, Galaxy Left Bank Music Festival, Bubble Island Music Festival, and Zilang Lychee Music Festival, as well as medium and large domestic performance scenarios such as Happy Valley and Sunac Land, and provided overall marketing solutions for tour projects of multiple artists; in artist marketing, iFLYTEK Music reached cooperation with Yu Wenwen and was responsible for the marketing operation of her new personal album "Boundary," achieving the album topping the bestseller chart at No. 1, with all nine included songs charting.
At the forum, Guo Jia also officially announced a new member of the AI entertainment ecosystem — virtual girl group Polli (珀翎) officially debuted with their first single "Judgment," and this brand-new content and IP will bring users immersive and unique sensory experiences in more diverse forms and richer content.
As capabilities across multiple areas have been consolidated, iFLYTEK Music announced that it will open its ecosystem and dance with the industry, releasing three major openness signals:
First, opening the cooperation mechanism, attracting talent with higher-quality and more flexible cooperation mechanisms, and inviting more industry professionals and artists to join the journey;
Second, opening solution services, fully opening service capabilities in new media operations, variety show marketing, song marketing, artist marketing, mid-platform technology, and various other solutions, and continuously calibrating and improving in a more market-oriented way;
Third, opening support investment, continuously advancing musician support programs and public welfare services, and protecting the music dreams in the hearts of ordinary musicians and children with relatively scarce resources.
Guo Jia said that at a time when AI is reshaping the music industry, iFLYTEK Music is willing to be a talent scout for musicians who hold passion and a booster for good content, bringing voices worth "being heard" to listeners' ears again and again, letting good voices have their echoes, and letting the world listen to our voices!
Let Passion Be Seen and Heard: iFLYTEK AI Entertainment Connects Content with Scenarios and Explores New Value in Digital Entertainment
As digital content consumption moves from a single audiovisual experience toward richer interactive experiences, music, film and television, IP, and AI technology are accelerating their integration, and the content industry is ushering in new forms of expression and development space.
In the themed sharing session of iFLYTEK AI Entertainment, Shao Zhen, General Manager of the Digital Entertainment Business Department, systematically introduced the latest progress of the business around the development approach of "content as the foundation, technology as the support, and scenarios as the connection," and also shared the implementation results of the new track, AI drama business.
[Shao Zhen, General Manager of Digital Entertainment Business Department]
"Passion is the starting point of creation; connection is the foundation of value growth."
Based on this philosophy, we are committed to promoting precise reach of high-quality content to users and deep integration into diverse life scenarios. At present, iFLYTEK has formed full-chain service capabilities covering multi-form content development, customized creative planning, scenario-based service co-building, multi-channel distribution and marketing, and refined long-term operations, building three business lines: ringtones, visual decoration, and input method, providing content parties, copyright holders, platform parties, and channel partners with full-cycle services spanning content development, scenario implementation, user reach, and long-term operations, and promoting value extension and sustained growth of high-quality content.
In digital content business, iFLYTEK extends music, artist, and IP content to audio and video ringtones, themes, wallpapers, skins, and input method interactions and other forms, covering more than 20 daily scenarios, with the ringtone business having more than 20 million monthly active users; the visual decoration business continues to develop digital products around nearly 100 partner IPs and has repeatedly ranked on vertical platform charts; on this basis, iFLYTEK has further laid out the AI drama business, building a full-process platform and tool system spanning content planning, creation, and distribution operations, providing partners with integrated support from creative conception to film and television production.
In music IP adaptation, iFLYTEK extends the creation of past hit songs into story worlds. Taking "Only Like First Sight," a hit song that dominated charts for nearly three years under iFLYTEK Music, as an example, based on the time-travel theme of "reincarnation across a thousand years," it built and created a love story spanning multiple lifetimes; in AI film, iFLYTEK participated in the AI production of the film "Chariot of Fury," a tribute to the centenary of the founding of the army; at the same time, the AI tourism promotional film "Echoes of Huishan," created in collaboration with Wuxi Culture and Tourism, jointly explores more possibilities for culture and tourism. In the future, we will continue to work with partners across industries, relying on capabilities such as multilingual translation, distribution, and global marketing, to help good Chinese stories go global, so that more works can cross languages and regions and be seen and loved by global users.
"Let countless passions converge here and co-create new value in digital entertainment."
Let Companionship Move from the Screen into Life: AI Trendy Toy Gununu Officially Released
At the 2026 iFLYTEK AI Trendy Toy New Product Launch, iFLYTEK officially released the AI trendy toy Gununu. Lu Jie, Head of iFLYTEK IP Business and Deputy General Manager of iFLYTEK Input Method, shared on the theme "Boundless Companionship, A New Chapter for Trendy Toys," showcasing iFLYTEK's latest exploration in connecting emotional value, trendy toy forms, and long-term companionship through AI technology.
Facing the brief but high-frequency "emotional gaps" in young users' lives, Gununu is not simply putting a large model into a plush shell, but starting from a sense of heart flutter, healing, and exclusivity, allowing AI to move from a tool on the screen into real life. The product adopts a soft plush form, balancing desktop companionship and portability; its image and touch have been created with the participation of more than 50 artists and art academy teachers and students, more than 100 sets of CMF tactile prototyping, and co-creation and blind testing with more than 1,000 users across multiple scenarios, making users willing to approach it at first glance and also willing to spend time with it over the long term in daily life.
At the technical level, Gununu relies on the iFLYTEK Spark large model and three core systems to build a complete experience chain from perception and understanding to memory and growth: the ContFlow real-time multimodal contextual interaction system integrates information such as semantics, tone, rhythm, touch, shaking, outfit changes, and life scenarios to dynamically judge users' emotions, intentions, and companionship needs; the MemLink five-layer dynamic contextual memory system transforms conversations and interactions into shared memories that can be continuously updated and invoked on demand; and the LifeTrace virtual-real co-nurturing dual-track growth system allows real-world interactions and digital space experiences to jointly affect Gununu's abilities, personality, and ways of expression.
"Growth is not unlocking; it is the continuous change of personality, abilities, and shared memories." Lu Jie said that iFLYTEK hopes to promote interaction "from the 'question-and-answer' of Voice Assistant to the 'real-time interaction' of Embodied Agent," making every interaction the context for understanding the user next time. With long-term companionship, Gununu around different users will gradually form different communication rhythms, initiative, and emotional styles, growing from a standardized product into "this one" exclusively belonging to the user.
Starting from Gununu, iFLYTEK will continue to build an AI trendy toy ecosystem around "diverse IPs, diverse forms, and multi-scenario companionship," allowing more original characters to move from digital content into real life. On October 21, Gununu already appeared at the CLE China Licensing Expo in Shanghai, and the exhibition will continue until October 23, where onsite visitors can experience the product form and companionship experience of AI trendy toys up close.
iFLYTEK Input Method 16.0: A Brand-New Personalized AI Keyboard, Drafting from Intent
Zhao Minglu, Product Director of iFLYTEK Input Method, introduced iFLYTEK Input Method 16.0 at the forum. From replying to clients to reporting progress, users need not only to turn speech into text, but also to look up information, organize information, and weigh wording. The third-generation voice input "intent-based drafting" released this time will help move forward to the moment when users generate expressive intent: understanding needs, organizing information, generating and polishing it into usable drafts, and turning complex expression into the matter of a single sentence.
Taking project reporting as an example, the user states the reporting requirements and proactively provides relevant task information, and the input method can organize project progress and timelines, adjust forms of address and wording according to expression habits, and generate a draft for the user to review, modify, and confirm. To accomplish such tasks, accurate recognition remains the foundation: once a person's name, time, or amount is misheard, even if the subsequent draft is fluent, it may still get things wrong.
Around this foundation, Wan Genshun, Director of Speech R&D at iFLYTEK AI Research Institute, introduced the three-generation evolution of voice input: the first generation "faithful recording," solving accurate recognition of what users say; the second generation "expression into draft," making dictation closer to usable drafts through spoken-language normalization, semantic correction, and polishing; and the third generation "intent-based drafting," further understanding what task the user wants to complete, whom they are facing, and what expression to form, moving from recording speech to completing expression tasks.
At the recognition level, the iFLYTEK Spark-ASR-2.0 speech recognition large model supports 202 dialects, with dialect recognition accuracy increased from 85% to 91%, improving recognition in complex environments such as low volume and high noise. At the expression-into-draft level, after the upgrade, users' average edit distance decreased by 34%, and the direct adoption rate of recognition results for long sentences of more than 30 characters increased by 40%. On this basis, the "intent engine" organizes materials proactively submitted by users into context, combines scenarios and intentions for task planning, generates candidate drafts, and adapts to personal expression based on memory actively authorized by users.
How can these capabilities be integrated into daily input? Zhao Minglu further introduced that 16.0, with a brand-new personalized AI keyboard, integrates task information provision, expression skill invocation, and post-draft modification and use into a handy input experience. Task-level information cards can organize text actively entered by users, copied content, or uploaded screenshots, and bring them in as needed when drafting; long-term memory records expression preferences after user authorization and supports viewing and management.
Users can also freely choose the keyboard appearance, arrange the skill dock and skill combinations, and the keyboard proactively matches relevant skills according to expressive intent. At present, more than 150,000 creators have created 300,000 expression skills, covering more than 10,000 expression scenarios. The "THE SHAPER AI Keyboard Shaper Program" launched on September 26 this year is also connecting creators from different industries and circles to jointly shape an AI keyboard that solves real-scenario problems.
Moving further from helping expression toward daily companionship, 16.0 launched the "keyboard buddy": interacting with typing rhythms, triggering full-screen animations when easter eggs are activated, with freely draggable positioning; users increase intimacy through typing and interaction and redeem personalized decorations, making the keyboard an interactive and nurtureable companion.
"What has supported us on the journey to this day includes continuously polished AI speech technology, years of experience in attentively serving users, and more and more users and creators jointly defining how AI can help expression." Zhao Minglu said, "Intent-based drafting is your exclusive expression partner."
From letting good voices be heard to connecting diverse life scenarios with digital content; from helping users organize expressive intent into drafts to letting vibrant characters enter daily life, iFLYTEK AI Entertainment is continuously exploring along the path of product personalization, emotionalization, and content openness.
"Our dream is very simple: to let more people express their ideas freely, to let creators' works receive more responses; and to let vibrant characters enter more people's daily lives." With the theme "Boundless Smart Entertainment • Let Dreams Speak," iFLYTEK AI Entertainment looks forward to working with partners to make expression more convenient, make creativity easier to realize, and help good content build longer-lasting connections with users.
