Five years ago, MiMouse, a technology startup dedicated to speech recognition, settled in China Speech Valley – the US Silicon Valley-like industrial zone at Hefei, Anhui province. With comprehensive policy support from local government, the company turned creative ideas into commercial products, such as the smart mouse, and generated 40 million yuan ($5.98 million) revenue last year.

Liu Shiming, the sales director, demonstrated the mouse's abilities by talking in Chinese to the computer, and it directly transcribed his speech into English within seconds.

MiMouse is one of the more than 900 companies, such as iFLYTEK, Hikvision and Huami Information Technology, currently operating in China Speech Valley. In 2017, the Anhui government issued a blueprint to build the valley with 5 billion yuan investment, aiming to foster a world-class industrial cluster in artificial intelligence with international competitiveness.