Using voice as a medium to access information and control devices is becoming increasingly common. The technology to enable voice and speech recognition improves day by day, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, but there's still some gap between queries being served and processed. Helsinki-based startup Speechly aims to change the status quo by developing new spoken language understanding APIs that can be used to build better voice recognition systems. The company has raised €2M in seed round for realising its goals. As mentioned above, Speechly has secured a funding of €2 million in its seed round.

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".