For the first time since 2019, the Speechly team was able to attend an in-person Voice Summit on December 7th and 8th at the Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel in Arlington, Virginia. Over 400 people attended in-person, with even more tuning in virtually to talk about voice technology and the broader voice industry.Speechly CEO Otto Söderlund flew in from Helsinki to do a live demoIn 15 minutes, I'm going to show how to create a voice enabled website in no more than 15 minutes ? if I can do it, you can do it too! #voicefirst #voiceai #voicetech #reactivevoiceuis #webdesign #webdevelopmen ..read more

Everyone who has built a robust natural language user interface, be it a voice UI or a chatbot, knows that getting all the details right can take quite a bit of work and iterations. Also, while most tools for building natural language UIs are designed around the same principles (intents and entities/slots), getting to grips with the intricacies of each platform can be similar to learning a new programming language.Hence, to lower the barrier of entry to Speechly from legacy voice UIs, we are excited to introduce a new feature that lets you create a new Speechly application from an existing Ale ..read more

Voice User Interfaces (Voice UIs) often refer to UIs that use voice both for user input and output. Voice UIs are typically built to enable a more efficient user experience. However, we frequently run into problems with voice-only UIs that result in confusion and frustration for users.At Speechly, we believe that many of the problems that exist with Voice UIs today can be mitigated or completely eliminated by adopting a multi-modal design philosophy. This means leveraging all the available modalities (voice, visual, touch) of the user's context to make the user interaction as easy and smooth a ..read more

This year’s conference was held in the beginning of September in Brno, Czech Republic. Typically there would be some 2000 attendees at the conference, but due to Covid-19, this year most of the attendees joined the conference virtually. I was there on site with 350+ other researchers, and here are my impressions on the scientific catering in the field of automatic speech recognition (ASR).New datasetsASR is a data-heavy field. Industry leaders are using tens of thousands of hours of transcribed speech to train their models, but most of the ASR research has relied on much smaller publicly avail ..read more

What is the Web Speech API?The Web Speech API is an experimental browser standard that enables web developers to effortlessly process voice input from their users. Its simple API can turn on the device's microphone and apply a speech-to-text algorithm to convert whatever the user says into text that the web app can process. At first glance, it seems to open the door to voice-enabled web apps.The problemHowever, browser support for this API is limited. At the time of writing, the majority of its support is centralised in browsers made by Google, who authored much of the API's specification. Ind ..read more

What is "Field Service" and "Field Service Management"?Field Service consists of “workers in the field” who perform various types of tasks. These can include things such as installation, repair, or maintenance of hardware. However, as technology continues to evolve we see the field service landscape evolving as well and expanding into other verticals such as education and healthcare. For the purpose of this post I am going to refer to “Field Service” as any service or task that is performed outside of company walls for a customer where a worker is required to physically visit the customer to c ..read more

Voice technology is moving fast and old insights turn bad quickly. Here we have collected some of the freshest and most interesting insights from various voice related surveys and researches.The pandemic has certainly affected voice tech, too, and germs-free is quickly becoming more important than overall hands-free.2020Adobe published their 2020 Voice Survey which contains a lot of interesting data points about voice tech. You can find the full report here. Some of the most interesting insights include:31% of voice users count sanitation as a benefit of voice tech37% would use voice user inte ..read more

Finland is a home to many highly succesful tech companies and startups ranging from gaming companies such as Rovio and Supercell to delivery company Wolt or IoT company UROS.In fact, Finland has been leading Europe in the amount of VC capital collected for two consecutive years. Last year, foreign investments to Finnish startups increased by a whopping 48%.This is why we are humbled to be selected to Top 10 Most Promising Startups in Finland by Talouselämä, the leading business media here in Finland.Other companies that made the list include:Boksi.com - automating influencer marketingInfinited ..read more

Success in eCommerce requires that your customers not only find what they are looking for but also find products that they didn't know they need. Good search is the key in both scenarios.Slow product discovery is one of the top frustrations for ecommerce shoppersSome customers enter your store knowing exactly what they are looking for, whereas others only have a vague idea of what they want and need some inspiration. In traditional knowledge management terms this is referred to as findability and discoverability.In e-commerce context findability refers to the ease of finding a specific product ..read more

When companies integrate voice technology, most will default to think of generalized Voice Assistant platforms like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. This mindshare has been earned by Big Tech and the innovation they have pushed forward in voice technology, however a lot has changed since Siri was announced in 2011 or Alexa in 2014.A major evolution is the alternative options businesses have to integrate voice technology, outside of the Big Tech providers. The purpose of this post is to understand the true value of domain ownership when integrating voice technology. In order to do this we need ..read more