Speech Technologies – an innovation showcase at Enterprise Connect 2018

Last month, Speechmatics attended Enterprise Connect in North America, the leading conference bringing together vital IT decision makers to discuss topics central to enterprise communications and collaboration. Speechmatics were delighted to be shortlisted as finalists in the ‘Innovation Showcase’ which was focused specifically on speech technologies for 2018. The conference lasted for three days and gave Speechmatics the opportunity to showcase its technology on the show floor, as well as exhibiting with partners Red Box Recorders, demonstrating how its technology works on live speech-to-text (STT) transcriptions.

The ‘Innovation Showcase’ saw great buzz surrounding Speechmatics’ Automatic Linguist (AL) framework, enabling an industry-leading language coverage for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The machine learning framework behind AL works by automatically learning the sounds of a language as well as the grammar and semantics in order to determine which sentences make sense, meaning that it can learn a new language in a matter of days. As well as showcasing our own products, Speechmatics also took advantage of the keynote speakers and presentations that were available each day. Amongst some of the content included a presentation from tech analyst Jon Arnold of J Arnold & Associates, titled ‘Speech Technologies for Enterprise.’ Here, Jon took a deep dive into STT and text-to-speech (TTS) transcription, voice analytics and an overview of how AI is leveraged in speech. This was a particularly pertinent topic taking speech beyond dictation and transcription to address how it can add new business value. Some of the main speech use cases that were mentioned included increased worker productivity, quality monitoring, compliance with call recordings and sentiment analysis. Speechmatics was called out and recognised at Enterprise Connect as leading vendors for point solutions for STT ASR analytics and cloud-based conversational platforms (software that is premise-based with a new cloud offering, purposefully built for a specific application but able to integrate with major cloud conversational platforms with enterprise not being the sole focus).

Katherine Codlin of Speechmatics said,

“AI is opening new ways to engage with technology and will continue to impact the way we work, communicate and collaborate. Our focus needs to be on how we can differentiate ourselves from our key competitors, be this by utilising our Automatic Linguist platform, on-premise deployment solutions, working with our customers’ preferred technology stack, or simply by being agile enough to work with each customers’ specific use case.”

Collin Davis, General Manager of Alexa for Business said that

“conversational platforms will drive the next big paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology.”

Another appropriate statement which certainly addresses the popularity of ASR and the need for its availability and accessibility to every company in the future. Watch Speechmatics’ VP of Products, Ian Firth’s product demo with Enterprise Connect here. Ben Leaman, Speechmatics