Soapbox Labs Founder and Ireland's AI Ambassador Patricia Scanlon - Voicebot Podcast Ep 351

Patricia Scanlon is the founder and executive chair of Soapbox
Labs, the company behind the industry's leading automated speech
recognition (ASR) for children. Scanlon has a PhD in speech
recognition, signal processing, and machine learning from the
University College Dublin, and previously was an adjunct lecturer
at Trinity College and on the research staff of Nokia Bell Labs.
She founded Soapbox Labs after recognizing that all leading ASRs
were trained on adult speech data and showed poor results for
children, particularly young children. 


Since founding Soapbox Labs in 2013, the company has helped
leading software providers bring ASR to education, gaming, and
other applications designed for children. We discuss many of the
applications and how education has changed since COVID. 


Scanlon is also Ireland's AI Ambassador and we discuss market
education for consumers, business, and government, as well as the
draft EU AI Act. She was previously a guest on the Voicebot
podcast in episodes 129 and 206, from 2019 and 2012,
respectively.