September/October 2022

Magazine Features

The Top Speech Technologies and Vendors: The 2022 Speech Industry Awards

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

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: Aural Analytics Makes Speech Vital to Health Care

The U.S. National Institutes of Health this past July awarded a $1.4 million grant to Aural Analytics, a Scottsdale, Ariz., startup that is on the cutting edge of voice biomarker technology.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: Deepgram Is the Startup Speech-Enabler

Some could argue that Deepgram reinvented automatic speech recognition (ASR) with a complete, deep learning model that yields faster, more accurate transcriptions with lower hardware and usage costs. Now the vendor is giving away $10 million in free speech recognition to developers.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: Dubber Turns Meetings into Meaningful Records

Dubber provides call recording and voice data solutions that are natively and uniquely hosted in the cloud, allowing its services to be embedded into third-party telecommunication and cloud collaboration platforms.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: LivePerson Centers on Conversational AI

LivePerson has been developing conversational technologies since its founding in 1995. A central piece in its technology portfolio for the past few years has been the Conversational Cloud, which the New York-based company launched in August 2020.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: NICE Powers Contact Centers with AI

When it comes to cloud contact center solutions, one could easily make the case that NICE CXone is among the leading integrated platforms. And in the past year, NICE really boosted performance and functionality with a slew of artificial intelligence-based capabilities powered by its Enlighten AI engine.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: ReadSpeaker Customizes TTS Voice Development

ReadSpeaker, a Dutch company founded in 1999, has operated as a subsidiary of HOYA since 2017. It provides text-to-speech solutions with more than 110 voices in more than 35 languages, but its most significant work has been in the area of customized voice creation.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: SoundHound Has Driving Ambitions for Speech

SoundHound, an audio and speech recognition company founded in 2005, has advanced as one of the top providers of in-car voice systems, elevating the automotive voice experience from a legacy command-and-control interface to more intuitive conversational functionalities for drivers and passengers.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: Speechmatics Makes Speech Recognition Truly Automatic

Speechmatics develops speech recognition software based on recurrent neural networks and statistical language modeling. The company, which was founded in 2006, recently collected $62 million in funding to advance its global expansion and infrastructure improvement plans.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: Verbit Acquires the Top Spot in Transcription

Verbit, an Israeli company, provides artificial intelligence-powered captioning, transcription, translation, and audio description technology and services backed by humans for added accuracy.

2022 Speech Industry Award Winner: Veritone Voices All Sorts of Projects

Veritone is an artificial intelligence tech company based in Irvine, Calif. Established in 2014, it has as its centerpiece the aiWARE hyper-expansive enterprise AI platform, the foundation for its extensive voice technology lineup.

The Business Case

Real-Time Guidance: Help for Agents and Customers

These AI solutions listen to and understand both sides of the conversation.

Forward Thinking

Reality Isn’t Sci-Fi—It’s More Startling

Speech tech, like all tech, keeps getting more mind-blowing.

Interact

The Brain-Computer Interface: The Frontier of Speech Tech

BCI offers hope for assistive technologies that help people who can no longer articulate speech.

Voice Value

The AI Contact Center Is Finally Here

Natively integrated capabilities abound in core contact center functions.