Patricia Scanlon CEO of Soapbox Labs - Voicebot Podcast Ep 129

Patricia Scanlon is CEO and founder of Soapbox Labs, the leader
in automated speech recognition for kids.


You may have observed a child attempting to use an Alexa or
Google Assistant device and noticed the success rate of those
interactions was noticeably lower than when you use it. A big
part of that is due to the fact that the speech recognition
models in leading voice assistants are tuned toward adult speech
patterns, tone, and enunciation. Scanlon points out that children
have shorter and thinner vocal cords and have often not learned
how to enunciate properly. That means the speech recognition
models tuned for adults are looking for the wrong cues when
attempting to discern speech from children and the poor results
are predictable. 


 


Scanlon began noticing this problem in 2012 and 13 and decided to
set out to solve the problem. That has led Soapbox into both the
Education Tech and Toys and Games markets. Today we discuss the
technology and the applications related to speech recognition for
children and even how her company is moving toward developing
entirely edge-based solutions with large vocabulary voice
recognition that never needs to send data to the cloud. We go
deep and wide on this topic that gets too little attention but is
likely to shape the experiences of the generation of children
born from this point forward.


Scanlon earned her PhD in speech recognition with a focus in
signal processing and machine learning at the University College
Dublin. She also has an undergraduate degree in electrical and
electronics engineering. Before founding Soapbox in 2013, Scanlon
worked for seven years as a researcher at Bell Labs of Alcatel
Lucent.