Last week I wrote about an AI startup that's building technology that can alter, in real time, the accent of someone's speech. But what if the AI goal instead is to make it possible for people speaking in whatever way they do, to be understood just as they are, and to remove some of the bias inherent in a lot of AI systems in the process? There's a major need for that, too, and now a UK startup called Speechmatics -- which has built AI to translate speech to text, regardless of the accent or how the person speaks -- is announcing $62 million in funding to expand its business. Susquehanna Growth Equity out of the U.S. led the round with UK investors AlbionVC and IQ Capital also participating. This is Series B is a big step up for Speechmatics.

According to a new report by Speechmatics, more than a third of global industry experts reported that the COVID-19 pandemic affected their voice tech strategy, down from 53% in 2021. This shows that companies are finding ways around obstacles that seemed impassable less than two years ago. The last two years have exacerbated the adoption of emerging technologies, as companies have leveraged them to support their dispersed workforces. Speech recognition is one that's seen an uptick: over half of companies have successfully integrated voice tech into their business. However, more innovation is needed to help the technology reach its full potential.

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.

Artificial Intelligence is considered one of the most revolutionary developments in the history of technology. Within a few years, the world has already witnessed the transformative capabilities of this tech. Not to our surprise, AI is already driving several innovations and powering some of the most cutting-edge everyday solutions. Already, a captivating conversation is taking place about the future of artificial intelligence and what it will/should mean for humanity. There are stirring controversies where the world's leading experts disagree such as AI's future impact on the job market; what will happen if human-level AI will be developed, will it lead to an intelligence explosion, and whether we should welcome or fear this advancement.

The speech recognition specialist what3words has released a new end-to-end Voice API that was designed to help people figure out where they're going. To that end, the API will allow users to say any three words, and what3words will provide them the address and GPS coordinates that they're trying to get to. The Voice API is built with machine learning and speech recognition technology from Speechmatics, and can be integrated into virtually any service or application. According to what3words, an address request is completed with only a single API call, making the system much simpler to deploy than alternatives that need to blend multiple APIs. The company claims that it takes only a few hours to get the platform up and running.

Speechmatics has built one of the most accurate speech recognition technology engines in the world. The technology is currently available in 29 languages, either in the cloud or, crucially, on-premises – a critical feature for businesses who do not wish or are unable to share data in the cloud. Speechmatics was recently awarded a Queen's Award for Enterprise in the'Innovation' category for 2019. The automatic speech recognition (ASR) market is currently worth $7.5bn and is projected to be worth $21.5bn by 2024. Applications of Speechmatics technology include almost instant transcription of audio files, live subtitling in broadcast, and the conversion of call centre recordings into text.

Interview SpeechMatics, the company founded by British neural network pioneer Tony Robinson, has made major advance in speech recognition. Speechmatics' Automatic Linguist can now add a new language to its system automatically – without human intervention or tuning – in about a day, crunching through 46 new languages in just six weeks. Consider that there are around 7,000 languages in the world, and that the top 10 languages cover less than half the world's population. The top 100 most popular languages still only get you to about 85 per cent. So speeding things up is significant.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has, for the last couple of years, dominated headlines as technologies associated with AI advance and appetite grows exponentially for AI products. Key market players in industries too many to mention are looking towards AI innovation to stay ahead of their competitors and gain market share, seeing AI as the catalyst for success. This appetite only serves to make AI start-ups a more attractive proposition to the global VC community. AI spending is forecasted to grow from $640m in 2016 to $37bn by 2025, according to market research firm Tractica. Tractica's research director, Aditya Kaul, told website Datanami that cases like image recognition, algorithmic securities trading and healthcare patient data management, "have huge scale potential", as well as in areas such as business services, consumer products, industry (industrial robotics), advertising, finance, media and defence.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has, for the last couple of years, dominated headlines as technologies associated with AI advance and appetite grows exponentially for AI products. Key market players in industries too many to mention are looking towards AI innovation to stay ahead of their competitors and gain market share, seeing AI as the catalyst for success. This appetite only serves to make AI start-ups a more attractive proposition to the global VC community. AI spending is forecasted to grow from $640m in 2016 to $37bn by 2025, according to market research firm Tractica. Tractica's research director, Aditya Kaul, told website Datanami that cases like image recognition, algorithmic securities trading and healthcare patient data management, "have huge scale potential", as well as in areas such as business services, consumer products, industry (industrial robotics), advertising, finance, media and defence.

Our Digital & Social Media Coordinator Lucy Woods speaks with Neil MacDonald who recently joined Speechmatics as Chief Revenue Officer. Having recently announced Speechmatics to feature as a finalist in the Fast and Furious Pitch Off (press release here) at Venturefest East, we wanted to find out more about this rising start-up. Speechmatics is the culmination of 3 decades of advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence research conducted by our founder Dr Tony Robinson. We apply the latest research in Neural Networks to the task of understanding speech. We provide an automatic speech recognition technology that unlocks the data contained within what we say to each other verbally.