AI Bias, Diversity & Inclusion in Voice Technology

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.