iFlytek releases device-cloud Spark X2.6

Background

iFlytek (科大讯飞) held its 2026 iFlytek Global 1024 Developer Festival in Beijing. The festival was the venue for the launch of the company's Spark X2.6 model series, which the company describes as a device-cloud model family.^[1]

Device-cloud (端云一体) refers to a design in which a personal device and a remote cloud server share one AI system. In this design the device can handle some requests on its own, while the cloud takes on tasks that need larger models or more computing power.

What happened

On 22 October 2026 chairman Liu Qingfeng unveiled Spark X2.6 at the festival. The model combines a 293-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts cloud model with on-device models, so that tasks can be divided between phones, PCs and other hardware on one side and the cloud on the other.^[1][3]

The model was trained on fully domestic computing power, according to iFlytek's announcement.^[2]

Key details

• Device-cloud routing accuracy was 96.1%, measured for the routing model that decides where each task runs.^[1]
• The on-device X2.6-4B model reached 41.9% agent-task coverage.^[1]
• The SparkAudio 1.0 speech foundation model and the WinWork digital-employee platform launched at the same event.^[1]
• The festival's developer competition drew 52,120 teams from 351 cities in 15 countries.^[3]

A launch event of this kind usually combines several product announcements, so the same audience hears about a model, a speech system and a workplace tool in one place. That is the setting in which the Spark X2.6 series was presented.

Impact

The event placed a model series, a speech model and a workplace platform in front of the same developer audience. The developer competition drew 52,120 teams from 351 cities in 15 countries.^[3]

For readers following the field, the launch is a concrete case of one design pattern: keeping parts of an AI system on the user's device and sending only some work to the cloud. Spark X2.6 is one example of how that pattern was put into a commercial product series in late 2026.^[1]