The Top Speech Technologies and Vendors: The 2021 Speech Industry Awards

Advances in AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and more fueled speech industry progress in the past year.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: AppTek Takes Captioning to New Screens

AppTek has a long history of innovation in the areas of artificial intelligence, speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing and understanding, and text-to-speech technologies, and finally it is getting the worldwide recognition it deserves.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: HandsFree Health Keeps Seniors Safe

HandsFree Health is revolutionizing the voice-enabled virtual health assistance market with a complete line of voice-enabled products to help the elderly stay safe and healthy in their homes.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Microsoft Buys Big with Nuance

Nuance had long been considered an acquisition target, and Microsoft finally pulled off a deal in April worth $19.7 billion. Microsoft reportedly plans to use Nuance's technology to augment its cloud products for healthcare, which were launched last year.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Red Box Thinks Outside the Box

England-based voice specialist Red Box began the past 12 months by launching Conversa, an open enterprise voice platform that lets users listen to, share, and act on enterprise-wide audio and media data.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Voiceitt Makes Voice More Accessible

Israel-based Voiceitt, a provider of commercial speech recognition technology, is refocusing attention on applications that can translate unintelligible and atypical speech in real time, enabling people with severe speech impairments and other disabilities to communicate by voice.

Speech Technology Inches Closer to the Edge

An emerging computing paradigm, edge computing, promises to improve response time, lower costs, and enhance security, but the ecosystem is immature.

The Speech Industry Eyes Another NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)

Neuro-linguistic programming can alter the way companies communicate with customers.

2021 State of the Speech Technology Industry

The latest developments and trends in seven important sectors

The State of Intelligent Virtual Assistants

Industry looks to tackle interoperability standards as it rings in the new year

The State of Voice Biometrics

Vendors need to respond to increasingly sophisticated threats

The State of Assistive Technology

Advances bring accessibility to more platforms and devices

The State of Artificial Intelligence

AI takes many forms, but they all have increased speech's usefulness

Voice Search Sees Business Boost

Companies are starting to use voice search for internal operations, but challenges remain.

As Speech Translation Advances, Barriers Continue to Fall

Technology improvements have pushed speech translation out to a smaller world

The State of Intelligent Virtual Assistants

IVA vendors shift from a horizontal to a vertical focus

How IVR with a Human Touch is Changing Healthcare

By putting "the human touch" into its IVR, executives at Wolters Kluwer Health are finding patients to be more responsive to automated calls, thereby reducing staffing costs and improving patient care.

Planned Parenthood Proves Chatbots Can Provide Answers to Tough Questions

Planned Parenthood introduced Roo, a chatbot that answers the sometimes embarrassing questions of teens and young adults who might otherwise not have access to science-based sexual education.

Embedding Speech Biometrics on Devices

Voice biometrics just might be the next great hope in securing data and other content. But as people use their mobile devices for more and more, embedding speech biometrics on these devices becomes more important

The Power of Voice in Health Care

The Voice Health Summit explores all the ways speech technology and AI are transforming healthcare.