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Why was SoapBox founded?

Company

SoapBox was founded in 2013 by Dr. Patricia (Trish) Scanlon, a speech recognition technology engineer, after watching her own young children interacting with gamified education apps.

The speech recognition software that is used in common voice assistant solutions, such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, is modeled primarily on adult speech data for adult users and won’t work well for kids, particularly in an educational, or other challenging contexts, like noisy or remote learning environments, or when fast paced and distracted conversations (e.g. gaming) are happening.  

Trish’s vision was to create accurate and scalable speech recognition for kids’ voices that caters to the idiosyncrasies and unique speech patterns of children that adult-focused speech technology finds hard to decode. In her popular ​TEDx talk, Trish explains how the latest advancements in speech recognition technology can “transform a child’s reading journey.” 

Learn more about why kids need voice technology built just for them and how SoapBox powers a range of voice-enabled education and entertainment experiences.

What is SoapBox’s mission?

Company

SoapBox’s mission is to make all kids’ voices heard in the digital world. Our voice technology powers magical, joyful, and frictionless experiences for children regardless of whether they’re using online or offline devices.

Learn more about us, our mission, and our award-winning voice technology.

What kinds of companies does SoapBox work with?

Company

SoapBox works with media, education, and entertainment companies across the world. We power these companies’ education tools and platforms (literacy, ELL/ESL, math, etc.), as well as their gaming, robots, interactive TV, and XR experiences. 

Our clients range from household names like McGraw Hill and Mattel to digital pioneers like Norby and Lingumi developing voice-first experiences. 

For most SoapBox customers, our off-the-shelf API, which leverages our pre-trained models, can be integrated quickly and easily to power their use case. Off-the-shelf integration is available for use cases as diverse as command and control, search, utility, menus, multi-choice questions, pronunciation assessments, conversation, keyword spotting, and moderation filters. Custom models can also be built for customers whose use cases require speech transcripts, voice chat transcripts, dictation, or reading fluency assessments. 

Speak with a Voice AI expert to learn more about SoapBox’s speech recognition software for children and to tell us about your use case for voice. 

SoapBox’s technology is proprietary. What does that mean?

Company

SoapBox’s voice engine is built from the ground up by SoapBox Labs. We do not use any third-party speech recognition tools or voice engines, such as those provided by Amazon, Microsoft or Google.

Since our founding in 2013, SoapBox engineers have been dedicated to building an independent, high accuracy, privacy-by-design engine that caters specifically to kids ages 2 – 12. That engine is specialist, proprietary, unique in its capabilities and easy to customize, and that’s why clients choose to work with us instead of one of the off-the-shelf voice tech solutions.

Learn more about our proprietary voice technology on our Technology page.

What’s the difference between SoapBox and other voice technology providers?

Company

SoapBox’s speech recognition technology is world class and leads the market for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s proprietary and built to work accurately for kids’ voices ages 2 years and up. 

Most other speech recognition systems are built primarily on adult voice data and model adult behaviors. Therefore, they don’t work well for kids. Kids are unique, and building speech recognition software for them is complex given their unpredictable speech patterns and behaviors, diverse accents and dialects, noisy environments, and their privacy needs. 

SoapBox’s voice engine has been built to accommodate all of these complexities. It can accurately understand kids’ speech down to the phoneme level and has been independently validated to show no bias in speech recognition between kids of different accents and ethnic backgrounds (to learn more about this independent research please email us: hello@soapboxlabs.com). 

SoapBox’s voice engine is also unique in the industry because it gives you the power to build — and change — the voice experience you’re offering (specific brand names, non-dictionary words, etc.) without the need for customization. And when you do need a custom approach (e.g., for speech transcriptions and reading fluency assessments) we can build custom models for you.

SoapBox’s voice engine is a game-changer for education companies in particular, where identifying subtleties in a child’s pronunciation (pronouncing “color” as “other”, for example) can have a big impact on their learning progress. 

SoapBox is also an independent company, whose technology is built from the ground up by our in-house team of experts. We focus only on building world-class voice technology for kids and have no business models around data, advertising, or marketing. We are a privacy-first company and proactively protect children’s fundamental right to voice data privacy. 

Learn about the features and use cases of our voice tech on our Technology page.

How does SoapBox ensure its voice technology works equitably for all kids?

Company

We’ve worked hard to ensure that our speech recognition technology treats all kids’ voices equally, regardless of age, race, accent, or dialect. Our technology is built on thousands of hours of children’s speech data from 193 countries and is highly accurate, returning pronunciation scores down to the level of individual phonemes.

In fact, our technology has been independently validated to show no bias across the wide ranges of race, accent, and socio-economic backgrounds you’d find, for example, in an urban classroom. That kind of validation is the result of eight-plus years of commitment by our Speech Technology and Engineering teams, and we’re exceptionally proud of it.

Learn about the features and use cases of our voice technology that make it so accurate for children’s voices on our Technology page.

I’m new to voice. How can SoapBox support my company throughout the voice journey?

Company

We love talking to new clients about how they can use voice technology in their digital experiences for kids!

Through SoapBox Studio, we partner with clients to support them with their technology needs and join them on their voice journey to delivering a successful voice-enabled product to market. Learn more about the bespoke services we offer on our Studio page.

Why build voice technology for kids?

Company

Most speech recognition systems have been designed for adult users, whose voices and speech behaviors are very different from kids. To work accurately for kids, voice technology needs to be designed uniquely with them in mind. Here’s why: 

  1. Physically, kids have a thinner, shorter vocal tract and smaller vocal folds, and their larynx has not fully developed, so they can’t always enunciate words properly.
  2. Kids won’t modify their speech or speaking behavior to be understood. They elongate, overpronounce, and over punctuate words. They also shout, whisper, and sing!
  3. Kids’ environments tend to be much noisier than those of adults. Their voices are  often competing with the ambient noise of other kids, TVs, ovens and dishwashers, TVs and classrooms.
  4. Kids’ privacy needs are different and much more expansive than adults’. Their data needs to be protected so that it can never be individually identifiable, used to create a unique user profile, shared or sold to third parties, or use collected data for marketing or advertising purposes.

Speak with a voice expert today to learn more about SoapBox’s speech recognition software for children and to tell us about your use case for voice. 

What are the most common use cases of SoapBox’s technology?

Company

SoapBox’s voice technology offers a unique opportunity to deliver empowering, joyful, and immersive experiences to kids of all ages and stages of development, experiences they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access or benefit from.

Here are our top use cases for voice technology in education:

  1. Early literacy: Literacy practice and assessment of expressive language manipulation from phonological and phonemic awareness to blending and decoding, letter sounds, words, and short sentences. 
  2. Reading fluency: All stages of reading fluency and running records from phonics to oral reading fluency and comprehension, assessing pronunciation, words correct per minute, reading errors, intonation, and prosody.
  3. Language learning: Pronunciation and comprehension practice and language skills assessments, from phonics and letter sounds through to fluency, speaking, reading, and conversations.
  4. Math: From counting and word math to speedy times tables and multiple choice questions. Natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition can help children to engage and build their confidence around mathematical concepts from a young age.

Top uses cases for our voice technology in entertainment include: 

  1. Gaming: Voice-controlled software increases accessibility and reduces friction in gameplay, manages privacy and safety, and offers cross-platform scalability across console, mobile, XR, and more.
  2. Media: Voice technology delivers interactive conversational storytelling, promotes longer engagement between kids and their favorite characters and is scalable across media, from TVs to theme parks. 
  3. Smart Toys: Voice offers interactivity and friction-free, magical play experiences. It also increases accessibility for younger children and can be delivered as privacy-first experiences, offline, or embedded. 

Have another use case for voice tech? Tell us about it on our Speak with an Expert page, and we’ll be in touch to schedule a call. 

What is the SoapBox voice engine?

Voice solutions

The SoapBox voice engine is our core speech recognition technology platform built from the ground up for kids’ voices, ages 2 – 12. It encompasses a range of features that address the needs of clients in the entertainment and education industry and caters to a limitless number of voice use cases for kids. Visit our Technology page to learn all about them.

What can the SoapBox engine do right off-the-shelf or out of the box?

Voice solutions

Many SoapBox clients use our pre-trained models, no customization required, for a broad range of use cases involving the scoring of multi-target words/phrases such as:

  • Command and control
  • Search
  • Utility
  • Menus 
  • Multiple choice questions
  • Pronunciation assessments
  • Keyword spotting
  • Moderation filters
  • Vocabulary acquisition
  • Comprehension assessments
  • Conversations and structured dialogue 

In this video, Computational Linguist Agape Deng demos some of these use cases of our voice engine. 

Tell us about your voice tech use case on our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and we’ll be in touch to walk you through how our voice engine can power your experience for kids.

How does the SoapBox engine deliver voice-enabled oral reading assessments?

Voice solutions

A feature of our voice engine called Fluency delivers accurate voice-enabled literacy practice and assessment for students in preK-12 and delivers rich, granular, near-real time data back to populate teacher dashboards. 

SoapBox’s Fluency feature has a level of accuracy that sets it apart from other speech recognition systems. Feedback on a child’s speech is returned down to the phoneme level, which means that every phoneme in a word is scored and can therefore Identify subtleties in a child’s pronunciation (if they substituted “color” for “other”, for example). Understanding every phoneme is a powerful capability of our engine and has significant benefits for our clients and their end users -for example in how it supports teachers’ instruction and early intervention in the classroom.

The granular data points generated by our fluency speech recognition feature — including Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM), insertions, deletions, substitutions, repetitions, and more — give teachers both immediate and longitudinal scoring with which to benchmark students’ progress and support on their literacy or language learning journey.

Visit our Fluency page for resources on how our voice engine powers oral reading tool for kids.

Does SoapBox offer tailored solutions for a specific client need?

Voice solutions

Yes, SoapBox offers both off-the-shelf and custom speech recognition solutions to fulfill clients’ specific use cases and delivery mechanisms.

Learn more about what we offer off-the-shelf and custom on the Technology page of our website. And tell us about your use case on our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form and we’ll be happy to set up a call to discuss further.

Does the SoapBox voice engine work offline? What delivery mechanisms do you offer?

Voice solutions

Yes, SoapBox Labs’ speech recognition system is available both online through our API and offline through our SDK. Embedded offerings are also available to lighthouse customers.

Tell us about your use case on our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and we’ll be happy to set up a call to discuss the best delivery mechanism for your product. 

How easy is it to integrate SoapBox’s APIs into my product?

Voice solutions

SoapBox Labs’ APIs are built to deliver functional integrations quickly and easily (i.e., we offer low-code and straightforward API implementations). Many of our clients have brought their integrations live within 24 to 48 hours. 

We use standard, RESTful APIs your engineers will be familiar with, as well as straightforward URLs, HTTP response codes, and standard HTTP features, which are understood by HTTP clients. We also support cross-origin resource sharing, allowing you to interact securely with our API from a client-side web application. 

We provide clients with access to our developer portal, which includes extensive documentation to support their integration experience, and access to our ticketed Support Desk for technical queries.

We’d love to tell you more about SoapBox’s voice engine and API integration. Simply tell us about your use case on our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and a member of our team will be happy to schedule a call.

Is SoapBox’s voice engine available in multiple languages?

Voice solutions

It depends on your use case! All of our off-the-shelf use cases (e.g., keywords, commands, and pronunciations) are already supported across multiple languages, while custom builds of our voice engine for transcription are currently available in English with French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese coming soon!

Looking to voice-enable a product in another language? Complete our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and we’ll be in touch to schedule a call. 

What are the benefits of voice technology?

Technology

Voice technology transforms passive experiences into interactive ones, allowing kids to engage more actively and use their voices to learn and play more immersively. It also makes learning a more rewarding and relatable experience to the modern student, in and beyond the classroom.

Voice-enabled apps, tools, and games give kids agency and access. They also breathe new life and opportunity into education and entertainment products and product roadmaps. 

Here are some examples of the many benefits of voice technology for kids: 

  • A pre-literate child can command and control their game or toy without having to struggle with a controller or menu. 
  • An emergent bilingual child can use their voice to practice pronouncing words out loud in a new language and receive immediate feedback and recognition for their progress.
  • A teacher can undertake more regular and automated reading assessments at scale, rather than individually with students, and get accurate scoring and feedback on each student’s progress. 

Looking to voice-enable a product for kids? Complete our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and we’ll be in touch to schedule a call. 

Is voice technology the underlying technology of voice assistants?

Technology

Yes, the voice technology that powers the smart speaker in your kitchen is fundamentally the same technology that powers voice-enabled apps, platforms, and products like games, toys, and learning tools.

Companies like SoapBox have built a specialist version of this speech recognition software so that it performs with high accuracy for all kids’ voices, without bias and with ambient noise, while also protecting their voice data privacy.

Does SoapBox build end-user products?

Technology

No, SoapBox does not build end-user solutions. We are a B2B company, whose voice engine powers end-user education and entertainment experiences for kids. Third-party entertainment and education companies license our voice technology to power their experiences for kids. See a sample list of our customers on our home page.

How easy is it to integrate SoapBox’s API?

Technology

SoapBox Labs’ APIs are built to deliver functional integrations quickly and easily (i.e., we offer low-code and straightforward API implementations). Many of our clients have brought their integrations live within 24 to 48 hours. 

We use standard, RESTful APIs your engineers will be familiar with, as well as straightforward URLs, HTTP response codes, and standard HTTP features, which are understood by HTTP clients. We also support cross-origin resource sharing, allowing you to interact securely with our API from a client-side web application. 

We provide clients with access to our developer portal, which includes extensive documentation to support their integration experience, and access to our ticketed Support Desk for technical queries.

We’d love to tell you more about SoapBox’s voice engine and API integration. Simply tell us about your use case on our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and a member of our team will be happy to schedule a call. 

Does SoapBox’s voice engine work on all kinds of devices?

Technology

Our voice engine runs best on mid- to higher-end devices. Performance can depend on a number of factors, including the use case. We test performance across a range of physical device types on both Apple and Android. Our lowest development target for Apple is IOS9 and for Android is API16.  

Tell us about your target device and use case by completing our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and we’ll be in touch to schedule a call.

How accurate is SoapBox’s voice engine?

Accuracy & performance

SoapBox is the only voice engine that offers accuracy for kids of all ages and accents down to the phoneme level. Here is some of the external validation we’ve received from our clients:

  • In their partner evaluation, MetaMetrics found a very high correlation between the SoapBox voice engine and human annotators for oral reading fluency assessments.
  • During extensive beta testing over a six-month period, education pioneer Amplify found a correlation of 96% between SoapBox’s automatic assessments and human scoring, a correlation comparable to that of human-to-human scoring that exceeds market standards. More details about Amplify’s evaluation and use case for our voice technology can be found in this literacy-focused white paper
  • Two pre-eminent US-based academic research institutions have recently undertaken independent studies of the accuracy of competing speech systems and found that for kids, SoapBox performed best. One of these studies focused on the existence of bias in speech recognition and found that SoapBox performed equally well among groups of Black, Latinx, and white children from different socioeconomic backgrounds and demonstrated no bias in speech recognition towards or against any particular cohort. Public-facing reports of these studies have yet to be published.

Contact us to learn more about the steps we take to ensure our pioneering children’s voice technology works equally and equitably for all kids’ voices.

Does SoapBox’s voice engine work with very young kids?

Accuracy & performance

Yes, our proprietary speech recognition technology works accurately for kids of all accents and dialects in grades preK-12, understanding their speech down to the phoneme level. 

Here’s two-year-old Hugh learning English using our client Lingumi’s language platform which is powered by SoapBox’s speech recognition engine.

Visit our Technology page to learn how our voice tech delivers accuracy for all kids’ voices.

Does the SoapBox voice engine also work for older children and adults?

Accuracy & performance

Yes! At SoapBox, our mission has always been to deliver a solution that works for all ages, accents, and dialects. To do this, we’ve focused on the hardest problem of all — delivering high accuracy for kids of all ages. We think of adults as the most well-behaved, mature, articulate children, so our models work well for them too!

How does SoapBox’s voice engine handle different accents and dialects?

Accuracy & performance

SoapBox is committed to building accurate, inclusive speech recognition technology that works for children everywhere. We’ve taken steps to ensure that no child, irrespective of their accent or dialect, is penalized for using a dialectical variant that is different, but not wrong. It’s paramount to us and to our clients that our voice technology is fair, reliable, and non-discriminatory. Many of our customers are delivering speech solutions to schools with rich and diverse cultural heritages, and it’s a core requirement that their products and solutions serve all students and teachers equally.

We’ve ensured that our speech recognition engine understands all kids’ voices by training our acoustic models on kids’ accents and dialects from 193 countries. The SoapBox voice engine can accommodate unique or custom pronunciations for any population and has been independently validated to show no bias in speech recognition across race, accent, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Visit our Technology page to learn how our voice technology delivers accuracy for all kids’ voices. 

How does SoapBox handle noisy environments?

Accuracy & performance

Our voice engine was designed to understand kids’ speech in real-world environments, without the need for headsets and mics, and to ignore background voices and noise without additional noise-canceling. Our kids’ voice data was collected on a wide range of mobile devices in informal settings, such as cars, homes, and busy classrooms.

Tell us about the noisy environment or educational setting where you’d like to use our speech recognition engine by completing our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form.

Does the SoapBox voice engine return phoneme breakdowns?

Accuracy & performance

Yes, the SoapBox voice engine returns voice data on kids’ speech down to the phoneme level. 

The phoneme breakdown feature of our speech recognition engine is a game-changer for education companies in particular. Identifying subtleties in a child’s pronunciation (if they substituted “color” for “other”, for example) can have a big impact on how teachers instruct students and lead to better learning outcomes over time. 

Read our white paper “Fluency: Understanding every phoneme” to learn more about our phoneme breakdown feature.

What is a custom language model (CLM)? Can I build one with SoapBox?

Accuracy & performance

Yes, we build custom models for customers who need them. For most SoapBox customers, our off-the-shelf API, which leverages our pre-trained models accurately, powers their use cases, no customization needed. Use cases for off-the-shelf include command and control, search, utility, menus, multiple-choice questions, pronunciation assessments, conversation, keyword spotting, and moderation filters. 

Custom models can also be built for customer specific domains and tuned to their own corpus of texts and style of language. These customers’ use cases typically include speech transcripts, voice chat transcripts, dictation, or reading fluency assessments. 

We’d be happy to customize and build a CLM for your voice tech use case. Get started today by completing our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and a member of our team will be happy to schedule a call.

Why is voice data privacy so important for kids?

Data & privacy

If there’s a privacy concern when it comes to adult users of speech recognition technology, that concern is much greater when it comes to kids. Here are three reasons why:

  1. Voice gives kids agency and allows them to learn and play in the most natural way possible – using their voices. But voice is another entry point to the internet, and we must be mindful of what we let our kids access, play, and digitally control when using their voices.
  2. Voice data is a form of biometric data. It conveys more than just what was said. Voice data convey our identity, our emotions, our intentions, our environment, and certain health conditions. Even our socioeconomic and educational background can be inferred from our accents and dialects.
  3. The data kids share on consumer platforms, be it voice data or otherwise, can be used to create profiles of them as individual consumers, and these profiles can follow them throughout their lifetime.

To learn more about the importance of protecting kids’ data privacy, read our interview with children’s data privacy expert Dr. Veronica Barassi.

How does SoapBox protect children’s voice data?

Data & privacy

We are a privacy-first speech recognition company. Since our founding in 2013, we have invested in a privacy-by-design approach to our data and technology, with the goal of protecting every kid’s right to voice-data privacy. Our kids’ voice data will never be shared with or sold to third parties, and will never be used to support activities like marketing and advertising.

We work with our partner privacy safe harbor PRIVO TRUST to ensure we  are fully compliant with relevant data privacy and data protection regulations, including COPPA and GDPR.

For more information on our approach to privacy, visit our Privacy page and Online Speech Services privacy policy

How does SoapBox’s approach to privacy differ from other speech recognition companies?

Data & privacy

When SoapBox Labs entered the voice technology market in 2013, it still felt like the wild west in terms of data privacy compliance for kids. Even so, a privacy-by-design approach to data and technology was part of our DNA from the very beginning. It wasn’t faster or cheaper to design-in privacy. Still, as a deep-tech, kid-focused company, we wanted to set ourselves up for long-term success – and that meant respecting every kid’s fundamental right to privacy.

To this day, other speech recognition software providers have competing business models that process and sell voice data for its commercial value. Not SoapBox. Here are the steps we take — and encourage all players in the voice industry to do the same — to ensure voice technology does not threaten kids’ rights:

  1. Deliver transparency on how kids’ voice data is used once it is stored. 
  2. Commit to treat kids’ data differently to adults’ data, even with consent.
  3. Commit to identify voice data captured without consent (e.g., from a playmate or visitor to the home whose parent has not given consent) and delete it.
  4. Develop kid/adult voice classifiers to protect kids from adult-centered digital environments and to recognize when parental consent is needed before storing voice data.
  5. Develop voice solutions where processing of voice data is embedded on-device.

Visit our Privacy page to learn more about how we build our voice technology to protect every kid’s right to privacy.

What is privacy by design?

Data & privacy

SoapBox believes in a proactive approach to voice data privacy. That approach, called privacy-by-design, means that we proactively take steps and build processes that ensure we never identify an individual child when processing their voice data. In this video, CEO Dr. Martyn Farrows explains further.

Please visit our Privacy page to learn more about our approach to protecting kids’ data privacy.

When we use SoapBox’s API, who owns our data?

Data & privacy

You remain the controller and processor of your customers’ and users’ data. Your system sends us anonymized data, which is not linked back to an individual. 

However, in line with some legislation (e.g., GDPR), we can erase a user based on their unique ID.

For more information on our approach to privacy, please visit our Privacy page and Online Speech Services privacy policy.

What is SoapBox’s database built from?

Data & privacy

Our database comprises tens of thousands of hours of children’s speech data from 193 countries, collected in real-world noisy environments (e.g., kitchen, classrooms, and cars).

Visit our Technology page to learn more about what sets SoapBox’s voice engine from other speech recognition systems.

What questions should I ask my voice or speech technology company to understand how they treat privacy?

Data & privacy

Kid-focused companies need to partner with a voice provider that takes all necessary steps to protect kids’ data privacy. Ask your voice provider these questions to ensure privacy is one of their top priorities:

  • How do you store voice data?
  • What advertising, marketing, and other revenue models are associated with your data?
  • Do you reuse or sell voice data?
  • Who owns the kids’ voice data on your system?
  • Do you employ a safe harbor company to certify your approach to voice data privacy? 
  • What rights do I have to the voice data processed by your system?

To learn how SoapBox protects every child’s fundamental right to voice data privacy, visit our Privacy page.

What other resources would you recommend to learn about kids’ privacy?

Data & privacy

Great question! There are lots of fantastic organizations doing the important work of promoting kids’ digital privacy rights. We recommend checking out these resources to learn more:

  • Sign up for the SoapBox newsletter and newsletters from other leading organizations in the kids and safety space like PRIVO and SuperAwesome.
  • Read the latest privacy reports and AI toolkits from the World Economic Forum.
  • Learn about the UK’s and California’s age-appropriate design codes. 
  • Understand the impacts of regional data protection legislation, like COPPA and GDPR.
  • Check out the UK’s new Online Safety Bill, which further enhances protections for children.
  • Read the EU’s new strategy to deliver a better internet for children (an addition to their existing GDPR legislation).
  • Keep up to date with the new US Kids Online Safety Act introduced in 2022, that requires online platforms to provide parents and minors with “easy-to-use” tools to keep them safe, limit screen time, and protect their data.

What is SoapBox Studio?

SoapBox Studio

SoapBox Studio is a bespoke service customized to your company’s need for resources and experience on how to deliver empowering, joyful, and immersive voice experiences to kids.

SoapBox Studio services include:

  • Product / portfolio creative reviews 
  • Voice and conversational UI / UX design
  • Pilot testing
  • Data privacy and compliance 
  • Data scoring, interpretation, and analytics
  • Custom domains
  • Online, offline, and embedded integrations

Email us to learn more about our Studio services.

Who is SoapBox Studio for?

SoapBox Studio

We have three main types of Studio clients: 

  1. Entertainment and education companies developing voice-first tools, products, and platforms for kids ages 2 and up
  2. Companies adding voice to existing products for the first time
  3. Companies moving from another voice provider and looking for a kid-specific offering with enhanced accuracy, privacy, and custom services

Learn more about our Studio offerings.

Do I have to be a client of SoapBox’s technology to engage SoapBox Studio?

SoapBox Studio

Yes, SoapBox Studio works exclusively with third-party companies who have chosen our voice engine to power their kids’ experiences.

We’re new to voice. Can a workshop with SoapBox Studio bring my team quickly up to speed?

SoapBox Studio

Yes! SoapBox Studio workshops are tailored to your company’s knowledge and experience of voice technology whether you’re brand new to voice or have some voice experts on the team. Our workshops are also suited to people across all disciplines in your company, from engineering and product, to policy, UX designers, sales, and marketing.

Email us or visit our Studio page to learn more about our workshops.

Tell me more about your different workshop offerings.

SoapBox Studio

SoapBox Studio workshops are typically one to three days in duration and can cover any and all of the following areas and topics:

  • Voice Technology 101: Our experts introduce you and your team to voice technology and how it works for kids with use cases in your specific market. We walk you through our voice engine features across 15+ distinct use cases (e.g., keyword spotting, wakeword, search, conversation, literacy assessment), share live examples, and answer all your questions. We also talk you through the considerations to keep in mind when choosing a voice provider and adding voice to your kids’ experiences.  
  • Identifying your goals and opportunities: Prior to the workshop, we undertake an audit of your existing product portfolio and roadmap, mapping our voice engine’s capabilities and use cases to them. During the workshop, we discuss your products as “now”, “next”, or “later” opportunities for adding voice experiences and begin to lay out a high-level plan taking your short- to longer-term resources and market priorities into account.
  • Partnering on the journey: A practical workshop that introduces your product and engineering teams to our Developer Portal (documentation and resources) and to the full range of SoapBox Studio services, from data and technology support to voice UI/UX services. We walk you through data requirements, the value of data outputs, reporting and analysis, your infrastructure requirements, and the steps to follow from testing through to pilot and launch. 

Email us or visit our Studio page to learn more about our Studio services.

What should I be looking for in a kid-focused voice provider?

SoapBox Studio

Here are five top considerations when choosing a voice tech provider:

  1. Insist on accuracy: Does the voice system cater to every style of behavior and speech pattern, and cover all your learning, entertainment, or edutainment use cases?
  2. Test for universality: Does the voice system work for all users across all devices?
  3. Mitigate the risk of bias: Does the voice system understand each kid’s voice equally well, ensuring equity, objectivity? 
  4. Prioritize privacy: Does the voice provider have built-in protections as part of their data collection, design, and engineering processes, and give you control over how your voice data is used? 
  5. Plan for partnership: If you’re a voice novice, look for a technology partner that can not only fulfill your technology needs but join you on your voice journey to delivering successful speech recognition products to market. 

Read our Buyer’s Guide for more details on these five points, and contact us to learn how we can partner on your voice journey.

How can I learn more about SoapBox’s voice technology?

Contact, pricing & support

We’d be delighted to meet you and discuss your use case for our speech recognition software for children. Please complete our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form and a member of our team will be in touch to schedule a call. 

Does SoapBox offer a free trial API?

Contact, pricing & support

Yes! Fill out our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form and a member of our Client Success team will be in touch to discuss your use case and free trial access to our speech recognition API.

Please note: You must have a product to integrate our speech recognition API into to access the trial.

How can I request support from SoapBox Labs?

Contact, pricing & support

Current customers can access support any time on the developer portal through the “Support” link, or they can email their Customer Success Manager directly.

What is SoapBox’s pricing model?

Contact, pricing & support

We will work closely with you to understand your projected usage patterns in order to identify the pricing model that will work best for you. 

Pricing includes access to our developer documentation area and ticketed Support Desk. 

To learn about specific pricing based on your estimated volume of transactions, complete our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and a member of our team will be in touch with you to schedule a call. 

How can I access SoapBox’s Developer Portal?

Contact, pricing & support

Complete our Speak with a Voice Tech Expert form, and a member of our team will discuss your use case directly with you as well as when and how to access our Developer Portal. 

How can I stay up to date on kids’ speech recognition technology?

Contact, pricing & support

Glad you asked! Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest insights into speech recognition software for children delivered directly to your inbox.

Also, stay up to date on what we’re doing for our customers and in the speech recognition and kidtech community by following our blog and social accounts: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Who can I contact to write an article about SoapBox Labs?

Contact, pricing & support

Thanks for your interest! We love talking to reporters about our work and our thought leadership when it comes to Voice AI, ethics, privacy, kids, and of course, the metaverse! To connect with our Marketing team, please email us at hello@soapboxlabs.com.