Well, from a technical point of view, we leverage the power of a global crowd to provide some of the world's biggest companies with the high-quality data they need to power their artificial intelligence. We're instrumental to the progression and development of artificial intelligence and we couldn't be prouder or more inspired to be involved in an industry that is changing the world. We bond over our shared love of software engineering, data science, and strong coffee. We like online gaming, running marathons, and team drinks. We celebrate authenticity and diversity and we're invested in what we do.

Free dataset worth $1350 to test the accent gap! Here's how accented speech data is the key to understanding multi-cultural users Given the demographic composition of the United States, it's no wonder that spoken English varies greatly across the country. According to the US census, there are 35 million non-native English speakers living in the US, of which 60% are native Spanish speakers. With so many accent variations, how do speech and voice technologies keep up? The more people your model can understand, the more likely you are to acquire and retain customers. Bias in speech recognition is a problem.

WASHINGTON - Portuguese-born Daniela Braga, founder of DefinedCrowd, a Seattle-based startup that specializes in artificial intelligence, is among the 12 members who will make up Biden administration's National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Resource Task Force. Announced on June 10, the new task force "will write the road map for expanding access to critical resources and educational tools that will spur AI innovation and economic prosperity nationwide," according to a White House press release. Braga, who moved to the United States in 2012 and founded DefinedCrowd three years later, said she was "truly honored and humbled" by this appointment. "The Task Force will provide recommendations for establishing and sustaining the NAIRR (National AI Research Resource), including technical capabilities, governance, administration, and assessment, as well as requirements for security, privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties," she posted to her LinkedIn account. "This is another step to have our country continuing to lead AI in the world in an ethic and unbias fashion."

Prominent growth areas include virtual agents in banking, infotainment systems in automotive, managing vast amounts of data and tele-health in healthcare, and education, which has seen a significant switch to online learning due to pandemic-related social distancing. Also, the number of IoT devices at home and in the workplace will multiply exponentially, with the number of active devices increasing from 7.6 billion at the end of 2019 to an estimated 24.1 billion in 2030. In the more immediate future, it's estimated that by the end of 2020, 50% of all search will be conducted via voice and 75% of U.S. homes will have at least one smart speaker. Tech providers thus have a growing requirement for vast amounts of speech data upon which to base reliable and comprehensive services. They have to protect against fraud and impersonation, recognize dialects and accents, even identify a user's emotional mood to respond in the most appropriate manner.

Human interaction with machines has experienced a great leap forward in recent years, largely driven by artificial intelligence (AI). From smart homes to self-driving cars, AI has become a seamless part of our daily lives. Voice interactions play a key role in many of these technological advances, most notably in language translation. Here, AI enables instant translation across a number of mediums: text, voice, images and even street signs. The technology works by recognizing individual words, then leveraging similarities in how various languages express the relationships between those words.

Eager to make extra money on the side, Washington, D.C., resident Paula Alves Silva turned to a gig emblematic of the digital age: She recorded sentences read aloud in the comfort of her home to help train artificial intelligence (AI) software. Silva completed the tasks in her native Portuguese tongue for Seattle-based startup DefinedCrowd, which develops machine learning algorithms that power products for businesses including heavyweights MasterCard and BMW. Such recordings could be used in voice recognition products introduced in new countries, or to train existing systems to recognize non-native speakers or regional accents, the company says. Silva earned $20 -- from 8 to 33 cents per sentence -- and considered that satisfactory given the short amount of time it took to complete the tasks. The knowledge that her task would contribute to a new artificial intelligence system was a bonus, she said.

SEATTLE, July 31, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DefinedCrowd Corp., a smart data company for AI, announced the closing of a $11.8M Series A funding round today. Led by New-York/Zurich based Evolution Equity Partners, the round brought in Kibo Ventures, Mastercard and EDP (Energias de Portugal) as new investors, and secured additional capital from current investors Sony, Portugal Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, and Busy Angels. "DefinedCrowd's SaaS platform has very quickly positioned the company as an innovative leader to solve AI/ML's global most pressing problem, the need for continuous access to highly accurate data. Evolution Equity Partners is honored to lead this growth-targeted Series A round that comes at an inflection point for DefinedCrowd to manage its triple digit revenue growth trajectory and customer on-boarding globally," says Dennis Smith, Founder and Managing Partner at Evolution Equity Partners and the newest member of DefinedCrowd's Board of Directors. The capital secured in this Series A round will be used to develop DefinedCrowd's product offerings, expand the team, and rapidly increase market-share globally.

With all the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, you would be forgiven for thinking that developing the algorithms powering deep learning are where the toughest challenges in the industry are.

With all the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, you would be forgiven for thinking that developing the algorithms powering deep learning are where the toughest challenges in the industry are. The actual challenge for most algorithms though is not their mathematics, but rather their inputs -- collating high-quality data that is well-labeled and allows for the training of these models as quickly and efficiently as possible. That's where DefinedCrowd comes in. The company, which is based in Seattle and Portugal, was founded in 2015 by Daniela Braga, a data scientist and natural language processing expert, and Amy Du, who has since moved on from the company to start a global entrepreneurship network. We've talked about the company back when it participated in Microsoft's startup accelerator and also when it was featured in the Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt New York this past year.