Voicebot.ai Interview
September 25, 2019
We’re on the front page of industry leading website Voicebot.ai today with this great interview with CEO and Founder Patricia Scanlon.
During the interview Patricia talks about the origin story of the company:
“My lightbulb moment was watching my child interact with technology. To them, voice technology is a need more than a want. And they don’t like not being understood.”
And why adult speech recognition won’t work for kids:
“They elongate syllables, overenunciate words, and don’t speak the same way as adults. We gathered thousands of hours of children’s speech to build our own dataset because any system is only as good as the data added to it, Scanlon said. “The big names in voice technology work okay, but once you have a child who deviates from adult speech, it becomes a problem. They don’t have or use the data on how children speak, so they struggle to understand them.”
“Looking back, I now know why there aren’t more companies competing with us [in the kids’ voice space]. Number one is data security. We’ve been very focused on that by design from the beginning”.
“Secondly, it’s very hard to build speech recognition for children. Other companies have made a lot of noise about smart products for kids, then the products never happen and they say it was too hard. Children’s speech recognition requires laser focus. People think it’s like another accent and it’s not.”
Read the full interview here
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