AI Bias, Diversity & Inclusion in Voice Technology
Understanding Every Voice
As we look to transform the world around us, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion will always be at the forefront of our focus.
What is AI Bias, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion?
Diversity is about all the ways in which people can differ. From where we live to who we love, and everything in between. As a global company, we believe bringing in talent with diverse experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds encourages people to think differently and be more creative. So everyone wins.
What is AI Bias, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion?
Diversity is about all the ways in which people can differ. From where we live to who we love, and everything in between. As a global company, we believe bringing in talent with diverse experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds encourages people to think differently and be more creative. So everyone wins.
Equity is about offering the same levels of access, opportunity and advancement to everyone. It’s about being fair to all. Our mission to ‘Understand Every Voice’ has equity at its core. The aim of our product is to ensure we give everyone the same, great experience from voice technology.
Inclusion is all about giving someone a voice. As global experts in deep learning and voice technology we know how important it is to make sure everyone is heard. The advances we’ve made in self-supervised learning have meant those who were once left out, are now given a voice in the room.
AI Bias is a systematic error created by artificial intelligence. There are many different types of AI Bias (Sample, Measurement, Algorithm, etc) and they’re often interlinked. We must do as much as we can – whether that’s educating ourselves or perfecting our technology - to try and guard against AI Bias. Challenges like this require effort, and an open mind, from all.
At Speechmatics, our mission has always been to ‘Understand Every Voice’ – a goal with Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at its heart. We keep it in mind when we look at every part of our organization, from our employment policy through to the technology we develop.
Ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace is our first priority. We’re committed to providing an environment where colleagues can be free to be themselves. We firmly believe recruiting talent with diverse experiences, perspectives and backgrounds encourages people to think differently and be more creative.
It’s why we encourage applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of gender, gender identity or expression, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, marital status, national origin, veteran status or pregnancy and maternity status.
Making a Difference
We want to reshape speech recognition so it doesn’t just work for some, but for everyone. Every voice, regardless of accent, dialect, age, gender or location, should have equal say.
At Speechmatics, we believe the more we’re exposed to different ways of thinking and speaking, the more likely we are to understand them. It’s the same for machine learning. If we give the training models exposure to a different variety of voices, they should become familiar with them. While it isn’t a cure-all fix, exposure is critical for reducing AI bias.
With our Autonomous Speech Recognition, we made a breakthrough to introduce self-supervised learning into our training. By doing so we’ve been able to up the amount of data we train on from 30,000 hours to 1,100,000 hours. The results have been extraordinary at reducing AI Bias.
There’s still plenty to improve. But at Speechmatics, we aim high.
Read our whitepaper to discover how we’re opening doors to all voices and making huge forward leaps in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion in speech recognition.
