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.
Funding details
As mentioned above, Speechly has secured a funding of €2 million in its seed round. The funding round was led by Berlin’s Cherry Ventures, along with participation by Seedcamp, Quantum Angels, Joyance Partners, Social Starts, Tiny.vc, Juha Paananen and Nicolas Dessaigne. The company says it will utilise the funds to further develop its offerings and release the public APIs of its technology.
Next generation of speech recognition
Speechly offers a new technology that is said to enable developers to create more complex, real-time and multimodal voice enabled user experiences. The company’s vision to enable better speech recognition stems from the problem that voice assistant currently fail to service complex user queries and it is difficult to integrate them with apps and UIs. The startup’s tech is compatible with all operating systems and platforms, and makes speech recognition available for majority of developers who are not experts with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) via its SDKs and APIs.
“Speechly offers developers the ability to easily build delightful voice user experiences that integrate well with their products and brands. We believe our technology will bring voice the same kind of renaissance as the iPhone brought for touch in 2007,” says Hannes Heikinheimo, the CTO of Speechly. “We have designed our own proprietary speech recognition technology from the ground up to support a significantly wider range of voice related user experiences compared to existing products out there,” Heikinheimo adds.
Image credits: Speechly
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