China's Google-backed artificial intelligence (AI)
Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Shanghai, Mobvoi's Li Zhifei told CNBC that the firm could "absolutely" compete with the likes of Amazon in the digital voice assistant market space.
"We are just like Amazon's Echo … We are making our own device and putting the technology into this device but gradually we are also going to open this AI service into third parties so that we can empower more devices," Li Zhifei told CNBC on Thursday.
In Western markets, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana are the dominant voice assistants. Amazon has continued to push Alexa across numerous products, while Google has rolled out Assistant across Android devices and its own Google Home device. Even Apple came out with its own smart speaker called HomePod this week.
Though Mobvoi's CEO acknowledged his signature chatbot device still has
The Beijing-based start-up was founded by a group of former Google research scientists five years ago and gained prominence after launching its flagship smartwatch,
"In the last few years we have made a huge amount of progress in speaker recognition but we haven't made much progress in natural language understanding, which makes the device not that smart (yet)," he added.