Summer 2021

Magazine Features

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

Advances in AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and more fueled speech industry progress in the past year.

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

AppTek has a long history of innovation in the areas of artificial intelligence, speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing and understanding, and text-to-speech technologies, and finally it is getting the worldwide recognition it deserves.

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

Like AppTek, San Francisco-based Deepgram, also joined CallMiner's Open Voice Transcription Standard (OVTS) as a founding member, but that is just one of the many partnerships it signed in the past year to advance its speech recognition capabilities.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: HandsFree Health Keeps Seniors Safe

HandsFree Health is revolutionizing the voice-enabled virtual health assistance market with a complete line of voice-enabled products to help the elderly stay safe and healthy in their homes.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Microsoft Buys Big with Nuance

Nuance had long been considered an acquisition target, and Microsoft finally pulled off a deal in April worth $19.7 billion. Microsoft reportedly plans to use Nuance's technology to augment its cloud products for healthcare, which were launched last year.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: ReadSpeaker Gives a New Voice to TTS

ReadSpeaker has been leading the way in text-to-speech (TTS) for more than two decades, delivering high-quality, lifelike voices for artificial intelligence-driven conversational applications, interactive voice response systems, and embedded applications.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Red Box Thinks Outside the Box

England-based voice specialist Red Box began the past 12 months by launching Conversa, an open enterprise voice platform that lets users listen to, share, and act on enterprise-wide audio and media data.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Sensory Is Living on the Edge

Privacy is a top consumer concern these days, and Sensory has it covered. The speech technology provider is a pioneer in embedded software, or speech on the edge, and addresses the privacy issue in a number of ways.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: SoundHound Feeds the Voice-Enabled Drive-Through

Speech technology has started to transform drive-through and drive-in interactions for quick-service restaurant chains, and Santa Clara, Calif.-based SoundHound is at the forefront of that innovation.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: TTEC Takes Over the Government

TTEC Holdings, an Englewood, Colo.-based customer experience technology and services provider, has been busy on the acquisition front in the past year, scooping up both Avtex and VoiceFoundry.

2021 Speech Industry Award Winner: Voiceitt Makes Voice More Accessible

Israel-based Voiceitt, a provider of commercial speech recognition technology, is refocusing attention on applications that can translate unintelligible and atypical speech in real time, enabling people with severe speech impairments and other disabilities to communicate by voice.

Editor's Letter

Emotion Is the Next Frontier in Human-Computer Interaction

Ever since the early days of the speech technology industry, engineers and developers have been on a never-ending quest to make voices that sound more lifelike and natural.

In Other Words

Are ASR Engines Ready for Machine Translation?

Speech recognition has come a long way, but even minor errors can make a big difference.

Interact

Building the Next Generation of ASR: Speech Emotion Recognition Apps

Getting rich real-world data is critical, but it's only half the battle.

A View from AVIOS

The Future of Intelligent Voice Assistants

Will you have one voice assistant or many? Which model will dominate?

Voice Value

Speech and AI: From Tipping Point to Table Stakes

Gone are the days when adding virtual assistants was enough.

FYI

Speech Can Help Students Read, Experts Conclude

Voice-driven tools have had a direct impact on fluency and literacy, unlocking far more natural and nuanced ways of gauging reading fluency and comprehension than traditional quizzes and tests.