They exempt a whole bunch of existing speech: insurance, politicians, marketing research and charities.
So VoiceBox developed specialized software programs that overlay existing speech recognition engines like those from I.B.M. and Nuance.
One improvement in Mr Greenberg's sights is voice control, extending the limited set of tasks that existing speech-recognition software on smartphones can accomplish.
Instead, its innovation is in the way it combines existing speech-recognition technology, customer assistance databases and telephone trees to produce a customer help session that more closely resembles a conversation than the typical, irritating "press 1 now" telephone experience.
Most existing speech-transmission-index-based metrics make use of the temporal envelope information and discard the temporal fine structure (TFS) cue to predict speech intelligibility.
Existing speech corpora that include dialect variation are limited by poor recording quality, small numbers of talkers, and/or small samples of speech from each talker.
Furthermore, it is crucial to extend existing speech quality assessors to cover a wide range of speech CODECs using subjective tests under longer bursty packet loss processes.
Existing speech therapy technologies can assist this practice by monitoring speaking rate and providing feedback to the patient, but cannot provide an accurate, quantitative measurement of speaking rate.
The result is that the gain floor is kept at more moderate levels in order not to distort the existing speech components.
The company is not using existing speech recognition APIs, because they wanted to improve the accuracy, and optimize for multiple speakers, says Liang.
