Anhui Digital Human Timeline

In November 2016, iFlytek (科大讯飞), headquartered in Hefei, held its annual conference where it demonstrated the "Super Brain" (讯飞超脑) cognitive AI system and announced the Xiaoman Robot (晓曼机器人), a service robot designed for banking interactions planned for early 2017 delivery. The same conference marked iFlytek's simultaneous first-place results at the Blizzard Challenge for speech synthesis, the CHiME-4 competition for speech recognition across all metrics, and the Winograd Schema Challenge for cognitive intelligence.

The year 2017 brought a series of institutional recognitions and policy developments that set the structural conditions for Anhui's digital human ecosystem. In January 2017, Hefei was approved as the second city in China—after Shanghai—to host a Comprehensive National Science Center, formalizing the city's status as a national-priority site for applied AI research. In June 2017, MIT Technology Review ranked iFlytek sixth among its fifty smartest companies globally, placing it first among all Chinese enterprises, a recognition attributed to the company's more than seventy percent share of China's speech technology market. In October 2017, iFlytek inaugurated the first annual 1024 Global Developer Festival at the Hefei Binhu Convention Center, establishing a recurring showcase that would become the primary launch platform for virtual human products in subsequent years, and backing it with the "1024 Plan" developer ecosystem fund of 1.024 billion RMB; no dedicated virtual human product was announced at that first edition, which focused on speech recognition and natural language processing. In November 2017, the Ministry of Science and Technology selected iFlytek as one of China's first four National New Generation AI Open Innovation Platforms, designating it the national platform for intelligent voice alongside Baidu for autonomous driving, Alibaba for smart cities, and Tencent for medical imaging. In December 2017, the Ministry established the National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence at iFlytek's Hefei campus, the first such national cognitive intelligence laboratory in China.

The year 2018 saw iFlytek's accumulated voice synthesis capabilities applied to named virtual human personas for the first time in Chinese commercial media. In March 2018, iFlytek and Southern Finance Omnimedia Group jointly created what was characterized as China's first AI virtual news anchor—a voice-driven virtual persona modeled on broadcaster Zu Jiangtao (俎江涛) and deployed for autonomous financial news reading on Southern Finance's stock market radio service in Guangdong—using iFlytek's personalized voice cloning system, the Xunfei Zhisheng (讯飞智声) platform. In May 2018, a visually rendered AI virtual anchor named "Kang Xiaohui" (康晓辉), modeled on CCTV host Kang Hui, appeared on CCTV-13's nationally broadcast "Live Yangtze River" program during its Anhui segment; the character was voiced through Xunfei Zhisheng and rendered visually by FaceUnity (相芯科技), and conducted an on-screen conversation with a field reporter and performed a tongue-twister demonstration. In August 2018, the Beijing-based financial media outlet Caixin partnered with Xunfei Zhisheng to create custom voice personas for hosts Zhang Hong and Yuan Xiaoshan, enabling autonomous AI voice news reading on its platform. In October 2018, iFlytek hosted the second annual 1024 Developer Festival in Hefei and simultaneously inaugurated the first World Voice Expo (世界声博会), co-organized by the Anhui Provincial Electronic Information Industry and IT Department and the Hefei Municipal Government; the event established Hefei as the permanent annual venue for China's dedicated AI voice and intelligent interaction industry showcase, announced cloud voice operating system iFLYOS and IoT platform iFLYIoT, upgraded the developer support program to "1024 Plan 2.0," and attracted over ten thousand participants to its inaugural AI developer competition. In November 2018, Hangzhou Radio's West Lake Voice station in Zhejiang partnered with Xunfei Zhisheng to launch virtual anchor "Xiao Xi" (小西) for broadcasting, extending the reach of Hefei-developed voice persona technology into the Yangtze River Delta media market.

The volume of iFlytek-powered virtual anchor deployments across China accelerated sharply in 2019. In February 2019, three separate AI virtual anchor debuts occurred in close succession: virtual anchor "Yang Xiaoguang" (央小广) appeared on Central People's Broadcasting Station's Spring Festival special in Beijing, multilingual anchor "Xiao Qing" (小晴) appeared at Shandong Broadcasting's Audio Spring Gala and generated over one million audience interactions, and a virtual anchor opened iFlytek's own 2018 annual meeting in Hefei. In March 2019, Xiao Qing became the first AI virtual anchor to serve China's National Two Sessions in Beijing, appearing on People's Daily's Smart Broadcasting for breaking news delivery and at the CCBN exhibition; in the same month, a virtual anchor modeled on CCTV host Sa Beining appeared on the broadcaster's classic music program. In April 2019, Xiao Qing was demonstrated at the Internet Yuelu Summit in Changsha as China's first multilingual AI virtual anchor. In May 2019, iFlytek deployments spread across several simultaneous national events outside Anhui: AI virtual reporter "Tong Tong" (通通) was co-created with CCTV for the Second Belt and Road International Forum in Beijing, virtual anchor "Ji Xiaomeng" (纪小萌) appeared on CCTV-4's May Day special, and People's Daily and iFlytek jointly created virtual anchor "Guo Guo" (果果) for the China International Big Data Industry Expo in Guiyang. Also in May 2019, iFlytek presented what it described as the world's first AI virtual anchor capable of broadcasting in seven languages—Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and French—as well as Uyghur and Tibetan, in a product demonstration believed to have taken place at an iFlytek event in Hefei. At some point in 2019, with the precise month unconfirmed, Hefei Television (合肥电视台) worked with iFlytek to deploy two visual virtual news anchors—a male character named "Wang Xiaojian" (王小健) and a female character named "Ma Xiaoteng" (马小腾)—for local news broadcasting, placing the station among the earliest television broadcasters in Anhui to operate iFlytek-powered visual digital anchors on air.

In August 2019, iFlytek received the Super AI Leader Applicative Award at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai for its next-generation speech translation system. In September 2019, it was officially designated the exclusive supplier of automated speech conversion and translation technology for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Later in 2019, at the First China Broadcast Convergence Media Development Conference in Beijing—the specific month of which was not recorded in available sources—iFlytek's AI Virtual Anchor System received the "Most Influential Broadcast Convergence Media Product" award, representing a formal industry endorsement of the virtual anchor product line that Hefei's technology had built. In December 2019, a significant institutional development was completed in Hefei when the Comprehensive National Science Center AI Research Institute (合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院), also known as the Anhui Province AI Laboratory and operating under the University of Science and Technology of China, was officially established with twenty-three national-level talent-led research teams and four major public research and development platforms, providing Anhui with a USTC-anchored institutional base for advanced digital human and AI research.

The early 2020s extended the virtual anchor product line while the country adapted to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, iFlytek and Xinhua Daily Media jointly launched virtual anchor "Hui Hui" (汇汇) for Jiangsu's Jiaohuidian Cloud Media platform, deployed for broadcasting in the Jiangsu provincial capital—one of dozens of regional media deployments powered by iFlytek infrastructure developed in Hefei. In October 2020, iFlytek held the fourth 1024 Developer Festival and the third World Voice Expo in Hefei in a hybrid format at Anhui Broadcasting Television Station's Asia No. 1 Studio, introducing the AI Virtual Human 5G Interactive Kiosk and its featured character, the visual interactive digital human "Ai Jia" (爱加), designed for public-facing deployment; the iFlytek Open Platform had by that point grown to over 1.57 million registered developer teams.

In 2021, Anhui officially listed artificial intelligence as one of its ten strategic emerging industries, providing provincial policy backing for the commercial digital human ecosystem developing in Hefei. In September 2021, iFlytek's AI Virtual Human Audio and Video Content Production System received the Gold Product Award at the Global AI Products Application Expo in Suzhou. The following month, in October 2021, iFlytek Chairman Liu Qingfeng released the Virtual Human Interaction Platform 1.0 (讯飞虚拟人交互平台1.0) at the fourth World Voice Expo at Hefei Olympic Sports Center, describing it as the industry's first virtual human interaction system: the platform enabled custom virtual human creation in approximately one minute, incorporated multimodal perception across voice, gesture, body language, and lip reading, offered fifty-four character types, and was reported to be serving over one thousand enterprise clients in media, finance, cultural tourism, and government sectors; iFlytek simultaneously announced the Open Platform 2.0 strategy at the same event. In November 2021, Changjiang Daily Press Group and iFlytek launched two virtual anchors—"Xiao Jiang" (小江) and a Changjiang-specific "Xiao Qing" variant—for three programs in Wuhan. In December 2021, Anhui Broadcasting Television (安徽广播电视台) held a metaverse seminar at AH SPACE in Hefei and announced a partnership with Fengyuzhou (风语宙), a subsidiary of the listed company Fengyuzhu (风语筑), to develop the station's first digital virtual anchor named "Xiao An" (小安), described as a native of Hefei and planned for appearances on the Anhui TV Spring Gala, variety shows, and news programs.

The year 2022 was defined by a convergence of metaverse policy formalization and further platform growth in Anhui. In February 2022, the Hefei Municipal Science and Technology Bureau announced that metaverse technology development would be embedded in its plans to become a National Science and Technology Innovation Center, as part of the city's fourteenth Five-Year Plan goals. In March 2022, the Anhui Provincial Electronic Information Industry and IT Department released the province's fourteenth Five-Year Plan for the software and information services industry, listing metaverse as a new business innovation project and directing enterprises toward virtual and augmented reality, 3D engines, and Internet of Things innovation. In May 2022, iFlytek launched virtual anchors "Qianqian" (茜茜) and "Xixi" (西西) on its own Douyin livestream channel, deploying an AI system that cloned a real host's appearance and voice for autonomous live-streaming—the first time iFlytek had operated visual digital human anchors as a direct commercial presence on a consumer short-video platform. In October and November 2022, the fifth World Voice Expo and 1024 Developer Festival at Hefei Olympic Sports Center featured virtual human "Xiao Yan" (小颜) as a twenty-four-hour online livestream presenter and hosted a Virtual Human Design Competition whose panel included Cao Xue (曹雪), the designer of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics mascot Bing Dwen Dwen, attracting students from top art academies nationally; by that event, the iFlytek Open Platform had grown to 513 AI capabilities and 3.7 million registered developers, with approximately 400 enterprise clients using virtual human solutions. Also during 2022, Tsinghua University's New Media Research Center ranked Ai Jia third nationally in its Virtual Digital Human Comprehensive Assessment Index, placing the iFlytek character behind only Luo Tianyi and Hajang.

The arrival of large language model capabilities beginning in 2023 fundamentally transformed what was possible on iFlytek's virtual human platform and accelerated the provincewide metaverse policy agenda. In February 2023, the Hefei High-Tech Zone released a Metaverse Industry Development Plan for 2023 to 2028, targeting 800 billion yuan in metaverse industry scale by 2028 and positioning Hefei as the leading metaverse innovation district in the Yangtze River Delta. In May 2023, iFlytek CEO Liu Qingfeng unveiled the company's first large language model, Spark V1.0 (星火), developed on Huawei Ascend AI chips; Spark V1.5 followed in June 2023 and V2.0 in August 2023. In September 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and four co-issuing ministries published a national three-year Metaverse Industry Innovation Development Action Plan covering 2023 to 2025, explicitly referencing digital humans and providing national policy architecture directly applicable to Anhui's ongoing metaverse initiatives. In October 2023, the sixth World Voice Expo at Hefei Sports Center saw iFlytek release Spark V3.0, which the company said surpassed ChatGPT—excluding GPT-4—on Chinese-language benchmarks along with twelve industry-specific model variants, and also launch the "Feixing No. 1" (飞星一号) AI computing platform co-developed with Huawei; the exhibition spanned 6,700 square meters and signaled the full integration of large language model reasoning into iFlytek's virtual human interaction stack.

The year 2024 brought the densest concentration of policy, product, and deployment activity in the decade under review. In January 2024, the Hefei municipal government issued a Metaverse Industry Development Plan explicitly identifying digital humans as a metaverse technology for application in cultural tourism, education through digital human teachers, and venue navigation systems. Also in January 2024, iFlytek released Spark V3.5, the first iFlytek model trained entirely on the domestic Feixing No. 1 computing platform, with claimed performance surpassing GPT-4 Turbo on language understanding and mathematics benchmarks and accompanied by a thirteen-billion-parameter open-source model. In April 2024, the Xinzhan High-Tech Zone in Hefei released a Metaverse Industry Action Plan for 2024 to 2026 at the city's first Interactive Display and Metaverse Industry Ecosystem Seminar, targeting industry scale exceeding 300 billion yuan by 2026 across eleven demonstration scenarios, and simultaneously unveiled the Metaverse Scene Innovation Center at Xinshijie (芯视界) Industrial Park. Also in April 2024, the University of Science and Technology of China integrated its former Big Data School and Suzhou Advanced Research Institute into a new School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, officially unveiled in June 2024, and simultaneously established a Humanoid Robot Research Institute, deepening USTC's structural contribution to Hefei's AI and digital human research pipeline.

In May 2024, iFlytek and Yuanmingyuan jointly deployed a virtual tour guide kiosk at the Yuanmingyuan Exhibition Hall in Beijing, powered by the Spark large language model and implemented as part of a Ministry of Science and Technology national key research and development project—an Anhui-developed system deployed at one of China's most symbolically resonant cultural sites. In June 2024, Anhui Daily reported that a research team at the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center AI Research Institute, led by researcher Zhou Wenguan, was building a video sign-language inquiry system for the Hefei 12345 Government Service Hotline and described the system as close to going online; the team had been working on sign language recognition since 2012, had published over forty papers, and had proposed the field's first pre-training model in 2021. Also in June 2024, iFlytek released Spark V4.0, which it said surpassed GPT-4 Turbo on eight of twelve mainstream benchmarks, was trained entirely on Huawei's domestic computing infrastructure, and supported speech capabilities in seventy-four languages and dialects. In July 2024, iFlytek served as the exclusive AI technology provider for China House at the Paris Olympics, where life-size AI replicas of swimmer Zhang Yufei (张雨菲) and gymnast Zou Jingyuan (邹敬园) were the central attractions—each featuring one-to-one-scale physical rendering, trilingual interaction in Chinese, English, and French, and integration with the Spark large language model—constituting iFlytek's highest-profile international deployment of embodied digital human technology to date. That same month, nine Anhui provincial departments jointly issued the Digital Economy Talent Cultivation Plan for 2024 to 2027, targeting cumulative development of over 300,000 digital economy professionals and over 200,000 digital skills talents by 2027, with artificial intelligence and metaverse listed among the covered domains.

In August 2024, Yunban Digital Technology (云伴数字科技), a Hefei-based company, created an AI digital twin of Anhui Television star host Ma Ying (马滢), powered by iFlytek's large model and computing platform—the first confirmed deployment in Anhui of a major-broadcaster AI digital twin built by a local startup using iFlytek infrastructure. In September 2024, the iFlytek AI headquarters campus, known informally as "iFlytek Town" (讯飞小镇), officially opened in Hefei's High-Tech Zone, comprising over 200 acres and approximately 400,000 square meters of construction with capacity for over 15,000 research and development personnel; Phase 1 involved approximately 2.4 billion yuan in investment, construction had begun in April 2022, and the campus forms part of the broader "USTC Silicon Valley" (科大硅谷) initiative. In October 2024, the seventh World Voice Expo at Hefei Olympic Sports Center saw iFlytek launch the Spark Ultra-Human Digital Avatar (星火超拟人数字人), described as the industry's first system capable of generating semantically aligned lip movement, facial expression, and body motion from a single photograph; the platform supported over 1,300 persona types with emotion-driven multimodal interaction and achieved a voice naturalness score of 4.2 against a human benchmark of approximately 4.0. At the same event, iFlytek released Spark V4.0 Turbo and the "Feixing No. 2" (飞星二号) computing platform, with the exhibition spanning 20,000 square meters across eight themed halls and attracting 35,268 competing teams from fourteen countries. In November 2024, the Anhui provincial government published its Future Industry Development Action Plan, placing metaverse among a cluster of strategic domains alongside quantum technology, space information, and general AI, and setting targets of 200 billion yuan in future industry scale by 2027 and 500 billion yuan by 2030. In December 2024, the China Voice Valley (中国声谷) high-quality development plan for 2024 to 2027 was issued in Hefei, setting targets for the cluster's evolution into a world-class intelligent speech and AI industry base; China Voice Valley, formally established in 2013 as China's first national-level AI industry base, had by that point grown to house over one thousand upstream and downstream enterprises in Hefei.

The opening months of 2025 brought a new wave of policy, technical, and startup activity across Anhui's digital human sector. In January 2025, iFlytek released updates to Spark V4.0 Turbo with enhanced document, mathematics, and long-text capabilities and simultaneously released X1, its first deep reasoning model trained on domestic computing hardware, along with an end-to-end speech simultaneous interpretation model. Also in January 2025, the Anhui AI Industry Pioneer Zone (安徽人工智能产业先导区) was officially launched as the province's designated AI development benchmark; Hefei's AI total revenue had reached approximately 949.91 billion yuan, smart computing power exceeded 7,100P, and Anhui ranked fifth nationally in AI industry development per the CCID research institute. In February 2025, the Hefei Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Research Institute (合肥人工智能与大数据研究院有限公司), a separate entity from the USTC-affiliated Comprehensive National Science Center AI Research Institute, had a patent application published for a multimodal digital human generation method and system, originally filed in October 2024; the technology applies three-dimensional morphable models to facial generation from reference images, combining motion coefficients with audio signals to produce personalized digital humans. In March 2025, the Anhui provincial government issued its "AI+" Action Plan targeting deep integration of artificial intelligence across the economy by 2030 and designating the Hefei metropolitan area as the core AI industry cluster. During 2025, Xinming Intelligent Technology (芯明智能), a Hefei semiconductor company formerly known as Yinniu Micro (银牛微电子) and founded in 2020, completed an A-round funding of over 500 million RMB and a subsequent A+ round; the company's chips—integrating real-time 3D stereo vision, AI inference, and simultaneous localization and mapping processing on a single system-on-chip—served as enabling hardware for digital human and extended reality applications, with clients including Xiaomi for the CyberDog robotic platform and international manufacturers of mixed-reality headsets.

In May 2025, Witian Yuntong (维天运通), the Hefei-based logistics technology company operating under the brand Luge (路歌), held its eleventh annual Truckers' Festival in Hefei, where fifty-two AI-generated digital human avatars of real truck drivers—including drivers Lü Libao and Zhang Haiqing—appeared in a dedicated livestream, accompanied by the launch of the company's AI Pioneer Program (AI先行者计划); the event represented one of the first documented deployments of AI-generated persona avatars by an Anhui industrial enterprise outside the media and entertainment sectors. Also in May 2025, Virtual Oasis (虚幻绿洲), a Hefei startup connected to the University of Science and Technology of China and located in USTC Silicon Valley's Silicon Valley Building, was described in contemporaneous coverage as being in its founding year, having developed a 3D digital human customization pipeline that compressed processing from weeks to approximately three hours using a single photograph, and having established working partnerships with Hefei Electric Power Company and Taobao Live for deployment of twenty-four-hour interactive digital livestreamers—an early indication of the diversification of Anhui's digital human ecosystem beyond iFlytek.

In November 2025, iFlytek held the eighth World Voice Expo at Hefei Sports Center, presented as China's first major AI industry event conducted entirely on a fully domestic computing platform. The event introduced what iFlytek described as the first multimodal interactive virtual human technology enabling natural, real-time multi-user interaction, and on its final day released Spark X1.5 with ninety-three percent efficiency relative to comparable global models, support for 130 languages, and the launch of what the company described as the world's first enterprise-level AI agent open-source platform; international participants came from Tunisia, Hungary, and Egypt. In January 2026, the Anhui provincial government issued the "AI + Everything" Application Action Plan (安徽省"人工智能+万物"应用行动方案), establishing a policy framework for comprehensive AI integration across all sectors of the provincial economy—a directive that encompassed virtual human and intelligent interaction technologies as embedded components of the broader AI-driven industrial transformation that Anhui had been systematically constructing, from iFlytek's earliest speech synthesis competitions through a decade of virtual anchor deployments, platform releases, policy plans, and the emergence of a diversifying local startup ecosystem anchored in Hefei.

[Mar 2026]