Helsinki's Speechly raises €2M seed for its 'natural language understanding' API – TechCrunch

Speechly, a startup out of Helsinki that boasts an experienced team of speech recognition and "natural language understanding" experts, has raised €2 million in seed funding to make it easier for developers to add a voice UI to their products. The round is led by Berlin's Cherry Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Quantum Angels, Joyance Partners, Social Starts, Tiny.vc, Juha Paananen (co-founder of Nonstop Games, which exited to King), and Nicolas Dessaigne (founder of Algolia). The funding will be used by Speechly to further develop and open up its API to enable non-experts to create voice-enabled applications. "Voice has shown real promise over the past few years but a real breakthrough beyond setting kitchen timers and playing Spotify is yet to be seen," Speechly co-founder and CEO Otto Söderlund tells TechCrunch. "The current fundamental problem of voice assistant platforms is that they tend to fail with more complex user requests and needs".