(Yicai Global) Sept. 26 -- Shares in iFlytek slumped in trading yesterday following allegations that the Chinese unicorn faked a demonstration of its flagship artificial intelligence interpretation product.

The Hefei-based firm's [SHE:002230] stock fell 3.9 percent to close at CNY28.93 (USD4.2) in the first day of trading after the Mid-Autumn Festival public holiday.

The slump followed allegations online that the company had passed off the work of a human translator as that of its own AI-based simultaneous machine translation tool during the recent 2018 International Forum on Innovation and Emerging Industries Development in Shanghai. The claim was posted on vastly popular question-and-answer platform Zhihu went viral and iFlytek drew the ire of China's internet community.

"The organizers of the conference, including the Chinese Academy of Engineering, all confirmed that iFlytek did not make any false claims," the company fired back in a statement on WeChat, adding it had no more comment to make on the matter.

With a market capitalization of CNY60.9 billion (USD8.9 billion), iFlytek is one of China's biggest players in the AI sector. It is a long-standing provider of voice recognition services to Huawei which the tech giant uses in its handsets. The company's shares were trading at CNY28.95 as of 11.00 a.m. Beijing time today, largely unchanged on yesterday's close.

Editor: William Clegg