SoundAI

SoundAI (声智科技) is a Beijing-based AI company founded in April 2016 by a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, including co-founder and Chief Knowledge Officer Chang Le . The company specializes in far-field voice interaction technology, combining acoustic signal processing with deep learning to enable speech recognition in complex real-world environments .

Its core product is the SoundAI Azero intelligent interaction system, which spans a full technology stack from chips and modules to cloud services, covering capabilities like echo cancellation, noise suppression, sound source localization, and voice wake-up . By late 2018, this system had been deployed across smart home, automotive, security, finance, education, healthcare, and robotics sectors, serving clients including Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, and China Mobile .

FreeS Fund (峰瑞资本) led SoundAI's angel round in May 2016 and participated in subsequent rounds, with the company closing a RMB 200 million Series B in late 2018 led by Yida Capital . As FreeS Fund director Zhu Yizhou noted at the time, SoundAI represented a shift in AI investing toward companies with deep industry service capabilities rather than pure algorithm plays .

In 2020, SoundAI partnered with NationalChip to launch a low-power offline-online hybrid voice module based on NationalChip's GX8008 AI processor, integrating SoundAI's Azero operating system . Looking back, FreeS Fund founding partner Li Feng described the 2016 investment as a bet on the then-unclear use case of microphone array technology for voice recognition chips—one that found its market with the subsequent smart speaker boom .