INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
There are times where voice-driven systems don’t work all that well because of background noise or other voices
That’s because it’s hard for machines (and humans) to pull out a particular voice when there are many others speaking
This is sometimes called ‘the cocktail party problem.’ Yobe was created out of research at MIT on how to solve this issue, and today it
announced $1.8 million in seed funding.The investment comes from Clique Capital Partners, a $100 million fund created specifically to fund
innovative voice technology
Yobe had previously received $790,000 in the form of a National Science Foundation SBIR grant in 2016.Company co-founder and CEO Ken Sutton
says Yobe is solving an entrenched problem identifying a particular voice in noise. That means for instance if you are at a party and you
want Alexa to play a Spotify playlist, you could (in theory at least), say the wake word from across a crowded room, give the playlist
command and the device would execute it in spite of the noise
That’s because Yobe can pinpoint a voice based on biometric markers, aggressively enhance the volume and then use AI to smooth it out.As
Sutton says, most of these voice interface technologies fail in this situation because they can’t distinguish your voice from the
background noise, but Yobe is supposed to solve this.Sutton made clear the research phase is done and the funding is about getting ready to
“The capital raised is not to continue RD
The capital raised is to streamline and optimize [the technology] for deployment
We will be in market with a product to sell in 30 days, and all of the usual suspects are lined up and waiting for us to call with a live
demo,” Sutton told TechCrunch.Ultimately the company hopes to license its technology to chip or phone manufacturers and others in a
scenario not unlike Dolby
Sutton acknowledges there are many use cases for a solution that could identify a specific voice in noise or among other voices such as
law enforcement, hearing aid manufacturers and meeting transcription services
You could even use voice as a biometric marker for authentication purposes
But the company has decided to focus its early efforts on voice-driven devices as an initial go-to market strategy.The company was founded
Hamid Nawab, an MIT PhD and researcher, whose work has focused on applying AI to signal processing
Nawab is the company’s Chief Scientist.You can watch this video demo to see how Yobe works:
