A US start-up is attacking the telephony-based speech recognition market in Europe with software that it claims is not only faster to implement than that of its competitors, but which can also learn from its interactions with customers to constantly improve its performance.
Boston, Massachusetts-based SpeechWorks International is using the bulk of the $18m it raised in venture funding in March (CI No 3,668) for a European expansion and has already linked up with CS Communications and Systems, the Paris-based IT services and telecom equipment vendor, to provide French-language speech recognition systems after opening a European office in the UK.
SpeechWorks, which now employs 135 staff, uses a speech engine developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, the company feels that its edge lies with a set of tools that make it easy for non-specialists to set-up its voice recognition systems, and software that monitors performance and reports problems.
SpeechWorks boasts that 50 of its own staff are ‘solutions engineers’ not concerned with voice recognition as such but ensuring that its software works with those of its clients in areas such as back-end integration.
Already available in Asia in Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, SpeechWorks comes to Europe with French and German versions. A UK English language version is likely to be developed as well as Italian, Dutch and Spanish versions.
A privately-held company, SpeechWorks will not reveal current revenue or when it plans an inevitable IPO. Among the more prestigious of its early investors are Intel Corp and SAP AG.
