Liopa Secures Seed Round
According to its website, Liopa has secured $1million in funding. The round is led by the company’s initial backers, techstart NI, and QUBIS. The money will enable it to commercialize the LipRead platform and actively market it for global use. Its latest investors include the AI Seed Fund, which exclusively supports start-ups that harness Artificial Intelligence to create leading-edge tech solutions. The funding round was also supported by Co-Fund NI which is managed by Clarendon Fund Managers.
Developed following 10 years of research by the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) at Queen’s University, LipRead uses the camera on a smartphone or tablet to analyze lip movement and decipher words and phrases. LipRead’s primary function will be improving the accuracy of commonly used voice-driven assistants (such as Siri, Cortana or Alexa) and voice-activated applications in noisy environments such as vehicles, offices & factories.
- Other potential uses of the lip-reading technology, which will be multi-lingual, include:
- An aid for the hard of hearing via automated subtitling
- Word/phrase search in uploaded video
- Human-robotic interaction; and
- Preventing authentication fraud (aka Anti-spoofing)