Cambridge vocalises series A

VocalIQ, spun out of Cambridge University in 2011, has raised £750,000 ($1.27m) in a series A led by Amadeus Capital Partners. The firm is joined by Parkwalk Advisors, which invested through its Cambridge University Enterprise Fund II.

Based on proprietary technology developed at the university by the Spoken Dialogue Systems Group, VocalIQ helps other companies and developers build spoken language interfaces for smartphones, robots, cars, call-centres, and games, among others. It does so by providing a layer of middleware that sits between the speech recogniser and the application.

The global voice recognition market was worth $53bn in 2012 and is forecast to more than double, reaching $113bn, by 2017. The market for the technology in smartphones was $15.3bn in 2013 alone, with a growth rate of 28.9%.

Current voice recognition still often struggles to interpret user input and produces irrelevant responses. VocalIQ’s approach to this problem is threefold. Semantic decoding is a series of machine learning algorithms that interpret what a user means. Dialogue management takes into account all of the voice input, analysing possible errors. The language generation, designed by the respective application developer based on templates, then responds to the user via a text-to-speech engine.

VocalIQ is looking to expand, and is hiring a senior software developer, a graduate software API developer as well as a data and applied machine learning guru. The former two positions come with employee stock options.

Hermann Hauser, partner at Amadeus, said: “VocalIQ’s team are a smart group who have identified a need for enhanced customer experience in speech technologies and are applying a combination of deep technical knowledge and commercial understanding to that need. With this funding, they will be able to expand the team and develop specific applications for testing. We are delighted to be on board.”