Otto Soderlund co-founded Speechly in 2016 with Hannes Heikinheimo in their hometown of Helsinki. He believes voice should be a first-class citizen for all apps and making it easy for developers to add voice support from any platform will unlock new innovation. Speechly is a member of the YC Winter 22 batch. Otto and I recently co-presented at the VOICE22 event in Washington DC although I presented remote so this is the first time we’re actually meeting. I heard good things about his talk so I was eager for this discussion. It didn’t disappoint.
- Why voice is the new app and what it means to develop “voice-first” apps
- How RAIN Agency uses Speechly to help auto technicians use voice assistants to fix cars
- How to accurately detect and transcribe speech when dealing with common challenges like background noise and accents
- When speech detection achieved “superhuman” levels of accuracy
- How Speechly combines speech recognition with natural language understanding (NLU) on the local device
- How Otto thinks about exercising responsible AI
- Why “voice technology won’t exist as a separate field in a decade”
