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

It’s no newsflash by now that the pandemic brought tremendous change to industries of all types, but with the speech technology industry it’s clear that COVID just hastened the progress that was well under way. Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing/understanding have led to dramatic improvements in speech technologies of all sorts, while other innovations have contributed to the rise of hands-free technology and smart everything. These advances, along with machine translation, speech analytics, voice biometrics, and text-to-speech, have benefited fields ranging from finance to healthcare to transportation to hospitality to retail (and, needless to say, the contact centers of each). Here you’ll find all of these developments—many of which would have seemed, frankly, amazing a decade ago—among the exploits of our 10 Speech Industry Award winners for 2021. Click the links below to read about their accomplishments in the past year.

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

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Deepgram Applies AutoML to Automatic Speech Recognition

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: HandsFree Health Keeps Seniors Safe

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Microsoft Buys Big with Nuance