Yobe Raises $1.8M in Seed Funding to Deploy Intelligent Voice Biometrics Technology

Yobe Inc, an industry pioneer in artificial intelligence-powered signal processing solutions, announced that it has secured $1.8M in seed funding from Clique Capital Partners, a $100M fund for investing in transformative voice technologies. The capital will be used to accelerate the commercialization of Yobe’s intelligent voice biometrics technology as they prepare for product launch this summer. The round follows a $990K round of angel funding and the 2016 receipt of a National Science Foundation SBIR grant to fund innovative research to solve the “Cocktail Party Problem.”

Yobe uses artificial intelligence to identify a signal’s DNA—biometrics in the case of voice—to accurately identify, track, isolate and separate voices of interest from other voices in extremely noisy environments, redefining the effectiveness of traditional voice authentication and speech recognition solutions. The technology allows device manufacturers to augment their products with vastly improved far-field speaker and speech recognition, superior voice UI and voice search, speech analytics and speech-to-text transcription, chatbots and conversational interactions.

Yobe says provides a number of improvements over existing voice technologies including the ability to:

• Separate and enhance voices in the far field, even in the presence of near field voices and noise 
• Improve the auditory scene by 20 decibels, exponentially improving the signal to noise ratio. Voices as low as a whisper can be effectively separated from background noise and enhanced for analysis 
• Track and support multi-user commands and profiles simultaneously, based on each speaker’s unique biometric signature 
• Embed software on smartphones and other low-power platforms for on device computations without the need for external power 
• Proprietary enhancement technology that increases sound quality while decreasing packet sizes from between 30% to 50% of its original size, addressing storage and download constraints