A couple of stories stood out in Slator’s coverage of M&A and Funding news this summer amid all the consolidation and SaaS investment news. First, was Israel-based language service provider (LSP) BLEND acquiring the company that recorded Siri for Apple.
Then there was Slator’s own rundown on recent investments in multilingual voice assistants. (In tech, there was also news out of Google I/O 2021 that DeepMind, the British AI lab the search giant acquired in 2014, had developed 51 new voices for Google Assistant.)
So why all the interest in voice assistants, especially coming from investors and LSPs such as BLEND?
One reason could be that as research behind voice assistants progresses, use cases are starting to expand as well. Technology that was once only confined to smart speakers and mobile phones now touches an increasingly wider range of industries, including call centers, e-commerce, the food industry, and so on.
Of course, there is also the language industry, where for at least one LSP, investing in a voice assistant provider was by no means a product of happenstance but “a methodological search process” over 18 months involving interviews with more than a dozen voice companies.
Pro Guide: Language Operations
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As Yair Tal, CEO at BLEND, told Slator, “Having witnessed the rapid rise of social audio and voice-based communications,...
Read Full Story: https://slator.com/reader-polls-machine-translation-in-social-media-life-sciences-opportunity-or-headache/
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