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: Deepgram Applies AutoML to Automatic Speech Recognition

Like AppTek, San Francisco-based Deepgram, also joined CallMiner's Open Voice Transcription Standard (OVTS) as a founding member, but that is just one of the many partnerships it signed in the past year to advance its speech recognition capabilities.

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: ReadSpeaker Gives a New Voice to TTS

ReadSpeaker has been leading the way in text-to-speech (TTS) for more than two decades, delivering high-quality, lifelike voices for artificial intelligence-driven conversational applications, interactive voice response systems, and embedded applications.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Sensory Is Living on the Edge

Privacy is a top consumer concern these days, and Sensory has it covered. The speech technology provider is a pioneer in embedded software, or speech on the edge, and addresses the privacy issue in a number of ways.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: SoundHound Feeds the Voice-Enabled Drive-Through

Speech technology has started to transform drive-through and drive-in interactions for quick-service restaurant chains, and Santa Clara, Calif.-based SoundHound is at the forefront of that innovation.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: TTEC Takes Over the Government

TTEC Holdings, an Englewood, Colo.-based customer experience technology and services provider, has been busy on the acquisition front in the past year, scooping up both Avtex and VoiceFoundry.

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.

Seniors Increase Use of Assistive Speech Tech

The growing aging population is a market ripe for voice-enabled technologies.

2021 State of the Speech Technology Industry

The latest developments and trends in seven important sectors

The State of Speech Engines

Developments come fast in a rapidly changing environment

The State of Speech Development Platforms

New multicloud solutions are emerging

The State of Speech Analytics

Technology now looks at more than what the customer said

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