Speechmatics Cracks Number Transcription with New Entity Formatting

W. Stofega

Summary Bullets:

• Accurately interpreting speech has posed challenges due to the variation in meaning and context that occurs during ordinary conversation.
• Entity formatting or number interpretation is notoriously difficult to achieve. People might say ’oh’ instead of ’zero,’ or use ‘triple three’ instead of ‘3-3-3.’

Speechmatics was founded by Dr. Tony Robinson in 2006 and is based in Cambridge, England (UK). Robinson was a pioneer in applying recurrent neural and deep neural networks to automatic speech recognition (ASR). Speechmatics employs approximately 250 workers and is privately held. In 2012, the company began offering its ASR software to enterprise businesses on a usage-based revenue model.