2024 Speech Industry Award Winner: Voiceitt Passes Inclusivity Milestones
A year ago, Alyson Pace, a former director at Cisco, replaced Danny Weissberg as CEO of Voiceitt, an Israeli provider of speech recognition for nonstandard speech. With Pace at the helm, the company that Weissberg cofounded in 2012 disrupted the voice accessibility market in several ways during the year.
“Voiceitt, which was founded with the mission to help people with speech disabilities live more connected lives, is emerging as a leading provider of voice AI for nonstandard speech. The underlying technology, speech recognition based on cutting-edge proprietary automatic speech recognition algorithms, has moved from science fiction to a real, working product,” Pace said in a statement at the time.
And that product is spreading around the world. Voiceitt in February brought its speech recognition to Australia through a partnership with Superyou Tech, a local disability technology and services provider. The partnership with Superyou Tech accelerates Voiceitt’s reach in Australia and increases access to the technology by advancing opportunities for users to obtain the Voiceitt app through various government funding mechanisms.
The company also expanded its reach into various work environments through a partnership with Virtualahan, an organization that recruits and trains individuals with disabilities for employment. In parallel, the company has been working with major employers across the tech, government, education, and healthcare sectors to deploy its technology in the largely untapped disabled talent pool.
The company followed that in June with the release of Voiceitt for Chrome, a browser extension that empowers
individuals with speech disabilities, accented English, or aging voices to dictate directly into websites. This tool integrates with products such as professional workspaces, email platforms, collaboration tools, and social media pages, enabling people with disabilities to create content and engage on the internet independently.
“Voiceitt for Chrome takes our current offering to the next level and represents a new milestone in our mission to make the digital world truly accessible by voice,” said Katie Seaver, a speech-language pathologist who serves as Voiceitt’s head of community engagement and impact. “By enabling dictation and content creation by voice, our first browser extension opens up the internet to our customers in unprecedented ways. From a quantum physicist in the United Kingdom to an elementary student in New York, the unique voices of our community can fully live, learn, work, and play through the capabilities of Voiceitt’s Chrome Extension. This launch embodies our team’s vision to expand the possibilities of cutting-edge voice AI and demonstrates that when technologies are accessible, anything is possible.”
Nicole Curd, an artist based in Iowa, uses Voiceitt after brain surgery left her with impaired speech and mobility, according to a release from the company. “I use [Voiceitt’s] speech-to-text for everything that would require either typing or speaking,” she said in the statement. “Just using [the Voiceitt app] has vastly improved my quality of life.”
Curd and other disabled people can use Voiceitt’s technology with confidence, knowing that Voiceitt successfully completed a pilot with deaf and hard-of-hearing participants that demonstrated the effectiveness and inclusivity of its voice AI technology in recognizing nonstandard speech patterns.
The pilot, facilitated by Newlab, a deep tech venture platform, found an improved accuracy with Voiceitt’s speech recognition with deaf accented speech. Deaf users in this pilot obtained an average of 8 percent word error rate (more than 90 percent accuracy) after training the system with 200 recordings. Voiceitt’s system also achieved higher accuracy than leading industry software for deaf speakers with non-standard speech who participated in the pilot, even with no training at all.
“Speech recognition technology is incredibly valuable for the deaf community,” said Tyler Pujeda, a heart researcher in Boston who participated in the pilot and is now an active user of Voiceitt’s application. “New inclusive products can help us feel listened to and understood.”
The successful pilot sets the stage for further strategic collaborations that could expand the impact of Voiceitt’s technology, potentially transforming how voice AI is used in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community and beyond.