Soapbox Labs - speech recognition technology for kids
by Startacus Admin
The speech technology company Soapbox Labs, who are specializing in children’s speech recognition.
Learning to read is a hugely important part of developing as a child. Reading underpins everything, and those who are able to, must learn to read in order to reach their full potential as an adult, even if their dream is to be the world’s foremost beatboxer. A parent’s role in this is vital, of course, but children should be able to read whenever they want, whether there is a parent or teacher around to help them or not. 
While this additional challenge of not having someone to jump in and correct them on the hardest words can help them develop, sometimes they will simply find themselves stuck, without help. So wouldn’t it be good to have something that can give them that help when there isn’t a human around to do so?
Dublin-based startup Soapbox Labs has made that something possible.
Soapbox Labs builds speech recognition technology for children using deep neural network machine learning and a proprietary, real-world child speech dataset. Partners can integrate either their online or offline solution, both of which offer the same level of accuracy and performance.
This third-party platform will allow people to create apps like Noisy Book, allow children to control toys and games with 
their voices, give the aforementioned help with reading, and anything else developers can think of. Their proprietary speech recognition technology is accent-agnostic and works for children as young as 3! It can also be used in busy, real-world environments, like classrooms or a playground.
This month, founder and CEO Patricia Scanlon was named Digital Hero 2019 at The Spiders, Ireland’s longest running digital awards.
In the same month, Soapbox Labs was chosen by Florida State University’s FCRR (The Florida Center for Reading Research) for a $30 million project to boost children’s literacy rates. These achievements are not the first and they won’t be the last for Soapbox Labs, and we’ll be watching out for the next ones...
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Published on: 24th November 2019
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