2022: Reflections on the Year for Speechmatics

With the holiday season almost upon us, now’s the perfect time to reflect on the past year and how much Speechmatics has accomplished. There have been some challenging aspects to the last twelve months, but without patting ourselves on the back too much, we’ve risen to those challenges. Every year, I like to take a moment to run through a few highlights.

True Success

Top of the list for me was the moment we finalised our Series B Funding, securing our future plans in the process. It was a monumental achievement for all involved and meant we could accelerate our global expansion across the United States and the Asia-Pacific region and improve our infrastructure. I’m still hugely grateful to everyone who made it possible.

Next, I’d like to shout out our incredible team for all the hard work bringing new features to market, including – but not limited to – our Financial Language Pack and Entity Formatting feature. Both have made a real difference to a host of different use cases, in particular, those in financial and customer services.

More broadly, by adding 14 new languages to our offering, we now support over half of the world’s population, enabling more people to access speech-to-text that outperforms all our competitors.

To read more about our other accomplishments – including awards we’ve won, accuracy uplifts, and much more besides – check out our ‘Review of the Year’.

Time for the Team

Now, I’d like to talk a little about our team. Midway through the year, we gathered for our Annual Summer Event, the first of its kind for us since before the pandemic. Back in pre-COVID times, a Speechmatics’ company gathering would be a small-scale affair, with our staff numbering in the double digits. Now, a few years later, we’re up to 164 staff and rising. To see everyone in one place for the first time was an incredible feeling.

I wrote in greater depth about what that day meant to me in this post, but in short, the feeling of togetherness – one that inspires happiness and success – isn’t one I’ll forget anytime soon. Days like these are well worth remembering, especially at this time of year.

One Eye on the Future

We’ve already got big plans for 2023. We recently announced our partnership with NVIDIA as we believe its market-leading AI systems and software stack is the best for training larger models to take our technology ecosystem to the next level. The impact this has on our accuracy levels will be well worth looking at early next year.

One of our first jobs for the new year will be compiling our annual Voice Report. We’d love to hear where you think the speech industry – and artificial intelligence as a whole – is heading. Your answers will not only tell us what you’re thinking, they’ll also guide us on our journey to a better future. You can have your say here.

Finally, I’d love to say a great big thank you to everyone in the Speechmatics team for their amazing work over the last twelve months. Every single person has worked brilliantly to achieve truly incredible results. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank our investors for their continued commitment. Finally, to all our partners and customers, we couldn’t do it without you.

From all at Speechmatics, we wish you a happy and restful festive season.

Katy Wigdahl, CEO, Speechmatics