Thursday 5 January 2017
Speechmatics (www.speechmatics.com), the Cambridge-based speech technology company, has received investment from multiple leading investors to accelerate the commercial roll-out of its products. Founded by Chief Technology Officer Dr Tony Robinson, who pioneered PhD research into Recurrent Neural Networks in the 1980s, Speechmatics has developed a unique machine learning technology to harness the full potential of speech technology.
“This is an exciting time to be in speech recognition”, comments Robinson. “We are at the forefront of how deep neural networks are changing speech recognition. With our ever expanding and highly experienced R&D team, we continue to push the boundaries in speech technology, especially around languages, accuracy and deployment.”
The firm received investment from several sources, including technology venture capitalist IQ Capital, AI/machine learning specialist and technology investors Amadeus Capital Partners and a number of leading technology investors including Laurence Garrett (Highland Capital Europe), Cambridge Professor Ted Briscoe, a world expert in Natural Language Processing, as well as co-founders of CSR, and Richard Gibson (previously Exec Chairman at SwiftKey).
Benedikt von Thüngen, CEO of Speechmatics, said: “Over the past two years Speechmatics has seen substantial growth, entirely through cash-flow. The addition of these highly-experienced investors as advisors to the business will help accelerate the on-going commercialisation of our technology and place speech recognition technology at the heart of all communications.”
Ed Stacey, Partner at IQ Capital Partners, added: “Speechmatics’ disruptive technology has significantly greater accuracy than competitors such as Google, IBM or Microsoft, which opens up many new commercial opportunities for speech recognition – from call compliance driven by legislation such as MiFID II and PCI DSS, to content discovery and speech analytics in order to spot trends and understand the voice of the customer.”
With a simple set-up and a combination of cloud and on-premise based solutions, Speechmatics technology enables businesses to generate data about customers and employees which is harnessed to improve process, efficiency, and benefit the bottom line. Speechmatics is now even more equipped to help clients navigate the complex changes in technology, to generate business insights, and to facilitate more powerful communications in the digital age.
Earlier this year, Speechmatics launched its new AI framework, Auto-Auto, which enables the company to add almost any language automatically. Since building the framework, Speechmatics has released a new language every two weeks, including most European languages, and Greek, Russian and Arabic.
Speechmatics has a successful track record of delivering exceptional results across a wide range of applications and industries: for example, language assessment with Cambridge English or content discovery with Udemy. Other applications include call centre analytics, call compliance, sub-titling, interview & lecture transcription and media monitoring. Speechmatics has developed highly accurate universal models that work across use cases and industries and do not need to be individually trained.
Tony Robinson’s world-class research team utilises the latest ML and AI technology to offer continual improvements in accuracy, an ever-increasing range of languages and new business applications. This technology is also designed to integrate with other applications in the workplace to generate value and insight.
Richard Gibson, recently appointed Chairman, said: “I am excited to be working with another successful game-changing deep technology company out of Cambridge. With this funding, Speechmatics will be able to harness the true potential of its technology and accelerate its commercial roll-out.”
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For press enquiries:
Charles King, PR advisor to Speechmatics
Email – Charles.king@weareoctopusgroup.net
Telephone – 020 3837 3769
About Speechmatics
Speechmatics (www.speechmatics.com) provides the world’s smartest speech technology harnessing the latest advances in deep learning.
Founded in 2006 Speechmatics draws on the technologies pioneered by Dr Tony Robinson during his PhD research into Recurrent Neural Networks in the 1980s and has developed new ways of using deep learning. These are combined with the very latest developments from academia and industry.
The automatic speech recognition system powers a wide range of different applications that all depend on converting speech to text as the initial step. Speechmatics has developed universal models that can be used in any use case without any further training. As a result, Speechmatics’ clients are using technology to improve their commercial value, ranging from data predictive analytics to language assessment or content discovery.
Speechmatics has a world class, international research R&D team comprising of multiple PhD researchers. Their unique approach to deep learning pushes the boundaries of what is possible in speech recognition, enabling faster, more accurate and more powerful communications in the digital age.
This technology enables businesses to get a better understanding of their customers and employees, allowing organisations to improve efficiency and daily processes, across many languages, and re-establish speech as the main form of human: machine interaction.
About IQ Capital
IQ Capital invests in ground-breaking technologies and ambitious founders, capable of dominating their respective markets. IQ Capital invests early and helps to drive growth for the long-term. The IQCP team has achieved significant exits since 1997 including Autonomy (IPO), Imsense (Apple), Neul (Huawei), Phonetic Arts (Google), KVS (Veritas), Stillfront (IPO) and Sirigen (BD). The most recent £50m 2015 fund is actively seeking new investment opportunities. For more information, please visit www.iqcapital.co.uk
About Amadeus Capital Partners
Amadeus Capital Partners is a global technology investor. Since its inception in 1997, the firm has raised over $1bn for investment and backed more than 100 companies in the software, mobile, internet, cyber security and medical technology sectors. The investment team is based in India, South Africa, Sweden, UK and USA, has deep experience in technology and invests in high-growth companies from early stage to pre-IPO.
Major businesses built by Amadeus include CSR, a connectivity, audio, imaging and location semiconductor company, now owned by Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM); Solexa, the developer of next generation genetic analysis systems, merged into Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) to create the world leader in gene-sequencing technology; Optos, the retinal imaging company, acquired by Nikon; ForeScout, a global enterprise security vendor; Octo Telematics, the provider of insurance telematics services acquired by Renova Group; and Tobii, the global innovator in eye tracking (STO: TOBII). www.amadeuscapital.com