Speech Technology eWeekly - May 09, 2018

Features

Why Virtual Assistants Need to Up Their UX Game

More than 2 billion people are expected to use conversational AI to interact with virtual personal assistants this year. But the dropoff rate is higher than you'd expect.

Speech Technology News

New Smart Glove in Development to Turn Hand Motions into Sound and Text

Hearing and speech-challenged people could have a new device to aid them with their communications hurdles by the end of this year. Start-up company BrightSign has developed a "smart glove" that includes a series of sensors to translate hand motions into sound and text.

Toronto Technology Firm Launches Next-Generation AI Chatbot, Rufus

Atomic X, an experiential artificial intelligence (AI) firm and consulting business, announced its emergence into the global AI marketplace with the launch of its flagship product, Rufus, a bot that introduces complex chatbot automation combined with a traditional live-chat system.

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.

Cortana and Alexa Are Making Friends

Reports from Microsoft's BUILD Conference say that Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella announced a partnership between the company and Amazon. Nadella says the two companies will integrate their voice-activated technology.

Speech Processing Solutions Signs ORdigiNAL to Increase Channel Distribution in UK & Ireland

Speech Processing Solutions announced a new partnership with ORdigiNAL, a European distributor of speech recognition, dictation, document creation, and telephony products. ORdigiNAL will act as specialist distributor in the UK and Ireland for Philips' professional dictation hardware, software, and cloud services.

Vonage Launches Chatbot Integration for Workplace by Facebook

Vonage, a business cloud communications provider, has announced the launch of its newest chatbot, Vee for Workplace by Facebook. Vonage has partnered with Facebook to provide Workplace users with virtual assistant capabilities to create and manage AI-enabled conferencing.