Building voice AI that listens to everyone: Transfer learning and synthetic speech in action
Join leaders from Block, GSK, and SAP for an exclusive look at how autonomous agents are reshaping enterprise workflows – from real-time decision-making to end-to-end automation. The awards recognize and honor the women leaders and changemakers in the field of AI. Botlhale operates on a SaaS model, charging by the number of agents or audio minutes processed. It currently supports 11 South African languages and is expanding to new markets, including Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria.
The Data Deficit and Why Big Tech Isn’t Solving It
By equipping educators and therapists with nuanced, reliable data, AI can empower professionals to make informed decisions tailored to each child’s needs. When designed thoughtfully and ethically, speech AI becomes more than a tool. It becomes a trusted partner in fostering literacy, equity, and meaningful learning outcomes for every child.
Embedded and instant payments: What Fifth Third sees in the near future
Children’s speech is fundamentally different from adults, considering a child’s mannerisms can be less predictable and often filled with grammatical inconsistencies or mispronunciations. Unlike adults, kids also often trail off mid-sentence or use vocabulary that is still developing – creating variability that’s harder for AI to process. For those designing the next generation of virtual assistants and voice-first platforms, accessibility should be built-in, not bolted on. This means collecting diverse training data, supporting non-verbal inputs, and using federated learning to preserve privacy while continuously improving models.
Netflix Uses Generative AI for First Time in Original Series ‘The Eternaut’
Its suite includes speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and natural language understanding products that help businesses transcribe, analyze, and monitor multilingual interactions. For many tech companies, the cost-benefit analysis and perceived market opportunity doesn’t justify the investment. Supporting child-specific speech recognition is often viewed as a high-effort, low-return undertaking.
Why General-Purpose Speech AI Falls Short for Children
- She is leading efforts to redefine the economic model of the internet, and creating a sustainable future for content creators, publishers, AI companies and the internet at large.
- These groups are already at a higher risk of being misunderstood by general-purpose models, and when speech AI fails them, it can exacerbate existing disparities in education and healthcare.
- The awards recognize and honor the women leaders and changemakers in the field of AI.
- They don’t replace general-purpose speech models, but fine-tuning them with ethically sourced, child-specific data to perform accurately in situations where it matters most.
- A major infrastructure addition is Zoho’s new MCP server, aimed at enabling interoperability across applications and agents.
The promise of conversational AI is not just to understand speech, it is to understand people. For too long, voice technology has worked best for those who speak clearly, quickly and within a narrow acoustic range. With AI, we have the tools to build systems that listen more broadly and respond more compassionately. Voice recordings of children often happen in overwhelming environments like classrooms or daycares, where multiple voices overlap and background noise is constant. Standard ASR models struggle to isolate a single speaker in such conditions, let alone accurately transcribe their words.
- This allows users to train their own voice avatar, enabling more natural communication in digital spaces and preserving personal vocal identity.
- Whether due to cerebral palsy, ALS, stuttering or vocal trauma, people with speech impairments are often misheard or ignored by current systems.
- Collecting the high-quality, representative voice data from children that’s needed to train AI models is also inherently complex, and for good reason.
- With AI, we have the tools to build systems that listen more broadly and respond more compassionately.
- This award honors a woman who has made a significant impact in AI research, helping accelerate progress either within her organization, as part of academic research or impacting AI generally.
The models are optimised for low-resource environments and are planned to expand to 15 other Indian languages. Botlhale AI, a South African startup founded in 2019, is helping enterprises understand what’s said in the 70% of customer calls that aren’t in English. Children’s data is highly sensitive and must be handled with care and transparent intentions.
