Blog - Company

Nov 16, 2021 | Read time 3 min

Belief and Passion in Speech-to-Text Innovation

Read how belief and passion in speech-to-text innovation is pushing Speechmatics forwards towards our mission to Understand Every Voice.
Speechmatics Team Meet the Team

Breaking the rules. Changing the game. Setting new standards. You can’t achieve these things without a belief in yourself. The confidence to follow your own path is the only way to bring about true change and here at Speechmatics, we’re all about pushing things forward. We believe in what we’re doing and through that belief comes the passion to deliver.

It was this belief and passion that, in the 1980s, made our founder, Dr. Tony Robinson, put pen to paper on his early research into Automatic Speech Recognition while studying for his PhD at Cambridge University. Dr. Robinson has since published over 100 research papers in the field, cementing his reputation as a pioneer of the application of recurrent neural networks in speech recognition.

This same passion was at play when Tony founded Speechmatics in 2006. From that point on, we’ve put research and development at the heart of everything we do, making significant technological breakthroughs in speech-to-text innovation as a result, including our latest move towards Autonomous Speech Recognition.

Over the last decade, our technology has been adopted by some of the largest blue-chip companies in the world, while our singular research focus has allowed us to become world experts in deep learning and speech recognition technology.

We’ve purposefully designed our product in a way that means you don’t have to be as passionate about it as we are. Voice-to-text might be a small (but crucial) piece of a much larger puzzle for you, so we believe in using our time and knowledge to save you energy for your field of expertise – whether that’s finance, entertainment or a variety of other industries we serve.

Choosing a partner like Speechmatics lets you reap the benefits of speech-to-text while allowing you to focus on your core offering. Speechmatics will guide you along the way, and give you access to our bleeding-edge technology and all the support you need to grow your business into the future.

New Gold Standard with Autonomous Speech Recognition 

Our passion, belief, and dedication to researching deep learning and AI has led us to our ‘Autonomous’ Speech Recognition. A step-change in accuracy and inclusion that leverages a wide range of voices using the scale and diversity of the internet. We’ve achieved this by understanding self-supervised learning, the machine learning capability we’ve introduced into our training.

This has led to a gold standard set of results. Now, our speech recognition technology has one of the best accuracy rates in the industry and we consistently deliver low word error rates across all languages and use cases.

But we’re keen not to rest on simply being the best. We’re always looking to pioneer game-changing additional features that make voice recognition a truly valuable tool for every business. Recently, we’ve introduced Advanced Punctuation to optimize the speed and ease of reading back transcripts – an invaluable addition when searching for insight. Our Custom Dictionary, meanwhile, allows you to add words and phrases distinct to your industry, so your business can rest happy knowing we’ve got you covered.

Our passion was at play too, when we challenged ourselves to build a speech recognition engine that was inclusive for all voices. Regardless of demographic, pitch, dialect, modes of speech or semantics, our accessible speech recognition engine means businesses can understand and connect with their customers.

What Does the Future Hold for Speech-to-Text Innovation?

We’ve made it to number one in terms of performance and accuracy and so we know we offer the best speech recognition on the market. If it was simply results that powered us on, we’d stop now. But it isn’t. It’s passion and belief. And when you’re on a mission to Understand Every Voice – a mission we believe in and will keep pushing for – you don’t stop until you’re done.