Latecomer to AI field, but has a slight edge

Tencent Holdings Ltd, best known for its all-in-one app WeChat, is making inroads into artificial intelligence or AI to give its exisiting businesses a tech fillip.

Though a latecomer to the voice computing field, the Shenzhen-based company aims to catch up with existing players on the back of its sprawling ecosystem and increasing investments in speech recognition and natural language processing capabilities.

In late June, Tencent unveiled Xiaowei, an intelligent voice computing platform developed on the basis of WeChat's voice recognition technology.