Sensory Releases Speech Recognition for Children

Sensory today launched custom trained speech recognition models that understand the unique linguistic patterns associated with children's speech.

The new recognizer designed for children's voices supports both Sensory's TrulyHandsfree phrase spotting technology and TrulyNatural large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer. With this technology advancement, developers of apps, toys, wearables, and education technology for children can implement voice control technology using Sensory's AI-on-the-edge architecture.

To recognize children's speech, which is challenging because it differs from adult speech, Sensory collected and analyzed significant amounts of children's speech to better understand and model the specifics of how children talk. Initial testing on a corpus of spontaneous children's speech revealed up to a 33 percent reduction in word error rate when compared to an adult speech recognition model, according to Sensory.

"Sensory has some of most talented technologists in the speech industry," said Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory, in a statement. "We challenged the team to create a private and accurate recognizer for kid's speech, and they delivered. This opens up new and fun voice-enabled products for kids of all ages."

"Sensory's new kids' speech recognition has already been integrated into several of our ICs, and we are seeing strong interest from our customers," said Jacky Chen, marketing manager at Generalplus Technology, a Taiwan-based supplier of integrated circuits for speech and toys, in a statement.

Developers can now access child speech models, as well as Sensory's adult speech models, within Sensory's VoiceHub developer portal.