In a world of ever-changing technology, there are continued positive disruptions that are improving our lives. One area that’s changing not only our personal lives but also every professional industry is voice technology, also known as VoiceTech.
VoiceTech is the use of acoustics to improve human-to-machine interaction and human-to-human interaction; it has fostered disruption and created new possibilities. In particular, the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and speech recognition is bringing new companies and tools to the market. This combination of AI and Voicetech is referred to as VoiceAI. Here are a few breakout companies that are changing VoiceTech globally:
Inscripta: Based in Finland, Inscripta is on a mission to make dictation ten times easier for healthcare professionals. Inscripta offers all their dictation and transcription services from a mobile device application. The mobility of this technology allows doctors to create voice notes from an ambulance, hospital, or while making a house call. After creating the note, Inscripta processes the dictation by “combining neural network powered speech recognition with human expertise.” Once completed, the software delivers the transcription to the provider’s electronic healthcare system “which happens in tens of minutes instead of hundred hours, which was the requirement.” This time savings gives healthcare professionals more time to focus on their core task of patient care.
Rita Singh: Rita Singh is a breakthrough researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute studying what makes our voices unique and how to leverage those differences. Singh’s research revolves around the fact that every individual’s voice is unique, just like DNA and fingerprints. Along with other researchers, Singh is working hard to convert voice into a “barcode to identify every human.” The software developed to make this “barcode” uses AI and machine learning and is similar to police profiling and suspect sketching.
By teaming up with the United States Coast Guard, Singh has been able to help root out fraudulent distress calls made by prank callers. Overall, the technology has helped cut down on operational costs used to respond to fake calls by allowing the Coast Guard to identify whether the caller is actually in distress.
Yobe: Ken Sutton, Hamid Nawab and their team at Yobe have successfully joined together the disciplines of Advanced AI, unconventional signal processing, and broadcast studio sound enhancement to offer unique voice technology solutions. The intelligent software tracks and separates voices to improve “overall sound quality and speech command accuracy for far-field applications and speaker identification platforms.” Low-power voice recognition technologies like Alexa, Siri, and Google Voice can use the software to validate authorized users from farther distances than they normally do; in other words, it increases the range of wake word platforms. The company also offers other voice technology solutions such as location-enabled gaming, hearing aids, hands-free voice authentication, 1Factor and .y3D.
