2024 Speech Industry Award Winner: Kardome Is Making Cars More Driver-Friendly

Speech technology vendors and car manufacturers alike are eager to get drivers talking to their cars, but systems have largely failed because of poor recognition accuracy. Now, as companies continue to incorporate artificial intelligence into their systems, cars are becoming better listeners.

One company driving that change is Israeli startup Kardome, which this year introduced a new speech and voice recognition product that it claims is the only one on the market that can individually capture and biometrically identify up to six speakers in three seat rows with a single microphone array.

The company, which was founded in 2019, says that its Kardome Mobility product is unique because of its 3-D spot forming, which uses reverberations, echo cancellation, noise reduction, speaker separation, and speech localization to recognize speech in noisy environments with multiple speakers. Most of Kardome’s competitors use beam forming and a much larger number of microphones, which increases cost.

“Kardome Mobility changes the paradigm that listening to all people in a car with a single sensor is an impossible mission,” said Kardome CEO and cofounder Dani Cherkassky in a statement. “We are proud to equip cars with human-level listening capabilities that enable a reliable voice user interface as well as intelligible hands-free communication, all while minimizing the cost of the system to manufacturers.”

Kardome has been testing the product in Europe with a concept car, but just this past January it inked a deal with Panasonic Automotive to integrate Mobility platform into the Panasonic SkipGen2 In-Vehicle Infotainment System.

“Our latest integration with Kardome Mobility builds on our efforts to elevate the customer in-vehicle voice interaction experience,” said Andrew Poliak, chief technology officer of Panasonic Automotive, in a statement. “Customers want to enjoy a seamless experience with their voice assistants while on the road. We are excited to be able to team up on an integration that will enhance the voice experience with the SkipGen2 Infotainment system.”

Cherkassky believes the Panasonic collaboration “will revolutionize the in-vehicle voice experience.”

But in-vehicle voice experiences are not the only area where Kardome innovations this year are making a difference. The company in January launched MyWord, enabling users of many voice-enabled consumer electronics and smart home systems to create their own custom wake words.

Kardome’s voice AI technology uses the Few Shot Learning architecture, which trains the core AI model to solve new identification problems with just a small number of voice samples or labeled training data. MyWord operates fully offline and adapts seamlessly to various industries, including automotive, healthcare, and consumer electronics.

“Our proprietary generative AI technology eliminates the need for expensive AI model training, making MyWord a cost-effective and accessible solution for manufacturers and end users,” Cherkassky said in a statement at the time. “MyWord is a game changer for the voice technology industry, and we’re excited to see the possibilities it opens up across industries.”

To that end, Kardome in late May announced a partnership with South Korean telecom giant KT to integrate its AI-based Spatial Hearing Technology into Genie TV, KT’s Internet TV service, bringing voice interaction to Genie TV users to enhance their entertainment and communication experiences.

With Kardome’s Spatial Hearing AI technology, Genie TV’s voice AI feature will be able to identify user voices and locations and tailor interactions to them.

The Genie TV provides audio/video-centric AI voice control and home assistant services through the TV. By integrating Kardome’s Spatial Hearing Solution into the Genie TV, consumers can use voice commands even noisy, multispeaker environments.

“This collaboration with KT is a significant step forward for both companies. It allows us to provide the best-in-class voice user interface for the Genie TV and opens up exciting opportunities for us to explore new verticals. We are optimistic about the future and can’t wait to see what it holds for us,” Cherkassky said.