Irish tech startup develops speech recognition designed specifically for children

Irish tech startup SoapBox Labs has developed speech recognition designed specifically for children and it’s available in toys and education apps. Focusing on children aged two to 12, the Dublin-based firm built its voice engine from scratch.

Patricia Scanlon, SoapBox Founder and Executive Chair, in an interview with CNN Business highlighted that children’s voices differ to that of adults. “Typically, they have a higher pitch or use different language or speech patterns, which regular voice technology cannot always pick up on. It’s understandable that an industry that has spent decades working on technology and only focusing on adults runs into a fairly significant problem when they try to apply children to it.”

SoapBox created a data set to train its AI system, made up of thousands of hours of children’s speech collected in real-world noisy environments like classrooms, kitchens and cars etc. from kids of all ages, accents and dialects hailing from a total of 192 countries. Scanlon said a system like SoapBox’s is very bespoke and focused on getting high accuracy and age-appropriate responses for children.

And with this latest innovation, SoapBox has opened a whole new market for which there is a growing demand. According to CNN, more than 8 billion digital voice assistants are expected to be in use by 2024, up from four billion in 2020. Moreover, there is an increased focus on adapting the tech for children. As such, Amazon in 2020 launched the next generation of the Echo Dot Kids Edition (child-focused Alexa device).

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SoapBox has raised more than $12 million in funding since its founding in 2013 and has attracted more than 50 clients from around the world. It has secured partnerships with online education companies such as New York-based firm Amplify, the Florida Centre for Reading Research and Lingumi, a UK-based English learning app.

The company says it falls into two categories of educate and play. The founder pointed out that the technology can help a child learn to read or learn a language. “It acts as the helpful adult, responding immediately to the child and giving them one-on-one time, and it can also help to record a child’s progress and provide feedback to a teacher or parent,” Scanlon said.