June 2022 Summaries

ISO 27001 is a certification that demonstrates a company's data security measures are adequate, allowing organizations to manage sensitive information such as financial data and intellectual property securely. Earning this certification provides tangible benefits, including visible proof of data security, encouraging ongoing focus on security, and joining a globally recognized community of secure businesses. By obtaining the ISO 27001 certification, companies can demonstrate their commitment to protecting customer data, reducing the risk of breaches, and increasing customer trust and retention.

The leading speech recognition technology scaleup, Speechmatics, has raised $62 million in Series B funding led by Susquehanna Growth Equity with participation from existing investors AlbionVC and IQ Capital to support its vision of being a world-leading speech platform. The company's speech-to-text engine is the most accurate and inclusive available, understanding every voice regardless of demographic, age, gender, accent, dialect, or location. With this funding, Speechmatics plans to expand globally across the US and Asia-Pacific, improving infrastructure and adding firepower to its research and development to deliver even more accurate understanding of even more voices.

The UK government has banned the use of hand-held mobile phones and other devices while driving a vehicle, with drivers now required to be stationary or use an accurate speech-to-text system to make calls or send messages. The increasing prevalence of accidents caused by texting and driving has led manufacturers to adopt the latest speech-to-text technology in their vehicles, enabling drivers to perform various tasks such as changing songs, finding routes, setting appointments, and even sending emails while keeping their hands on the wheel. To test this technology, Speechmatics conducted an experiment using a corpus of audio recordings from 86 English speakers in-car environments with varying noise conditions, finding that its Autonomous Speech Recognition (ASR) system outperformed competitors by up to 60% accuracy levels, with the largest difference seen in noisy conditions. The company's focus is on developing accurate voice recognition technology for various use cases, including hands-free driving, and has partnered with manufacturers such as BMW and Microsoft to create more natural-sounding systems that account for non-perfect speech. As a result, vehicles' AI is becoming increasingly competent, with 73% of drivers anticipating the use of built-in voice assistants by 2022 and 90% of new vehicles expected to have in-car voice tech embedded by 2028.

The UK is celebrating 50 years of Pride, a milestone that marks significant progress in LGBTQ+ rights since the first Pride march in 1972, which had only 2,000 participants. Despite this, the country still has work to do, with a drop in its ranking on the rainbow benchmarking tool due to concerns over the government's equality body not effectively protecting citizens' rights. However, other countries like Denmark, Iceland, Germany, and France are making strides towards full equality and human rights for all LGBTQ+ individuals. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association Europe (ILGA-Europe) has highlighted these countries as leaders in promoting progress. Meanwhile, companies like Speechmatics prioritize diversity, inclusivity, and employee empowerment, welcoming employees from all backgrounds to bring their authentic selves to work.

ENCO has partnered with Speechmatics to integrate its Autonomous Speech Recognition (ASR) technology into its new enCaption5 automated captioning and transcription solution, enabling accurate transcripts of AV content regardless of speaker's demographic, age, gender, accent, dialect, or location. The partnership leverages Speechmatics' deep learning-powered ASR technology, which is trained on large amounts of unlabeled data without human intervention, delivering comprehensive understanding of all voices and reducing AI bias and errors. ENCO will showcase the Speechmatics-enabled enCaption5 at InfoComm 2022, highlighting its cloud-native architecture, intuitive user interface, and advanced features such as integration with external vocabulary sources and media indexing. The partnership is seen as a significant step forward for both companies, with ENCO taking considerable pride in its association with Speechmatics as recognized leaders in the automated broadcast and AV solutions space.

Speechmatics recently returned from the FinTech World Forum 2022 in London where they discussed the various use cases of ASR (Artificial Speech Recognition) technology in the financial sector. The company highlights five key areas where ASR can bring significant ROI, including contact centers, voice assistants, RegTech and compliance, rich media, and employee productivity. According to a recent study by Marqual IT solutions, the market share of speech-to-text technology is expected to reach $5.8 billion in 2027, with Banking & Finance being the largest segment. Speechmatics emphasizes its ability to support high accuracy ASR, beating competitors like Microsoft and Google, and has recently added Entity Formatting to its features, which can provide both written and spoken transcripts for improved readability.