How Speechmatics is leading the way in tackling AI bias

This week, Cambridge-based AI speech recognition provider Speechmatics launched its'Autonomous Speech Recognition' software. The company's technology was found to outperform Amazon and Google in overall accuracy for African American voices (82.8% versus Google's 68.7% and Amazon's 68.6%), based on datasets used in Stanford's'Racial Disparities in Speech Recognition' study. This equates to a 45% reduction in speech recognition errors – the equivalent of three words in an average sentence – and Speechmatics' new software looks to deliver similar improvements in accuracy across accents, dialects, age, and other sociodemographic characteristics. Up to now, speech recognition has been commonly misconceived due to the limited amount of labelled data available to train on. But in this Q&A, Speechmatics CMO David Keene explained to Information Age the value that the technology can bring, and the importance of diversity and inclusion in tech.