‘Silent knight’ AudioTelligence raises $8.5m in Series A round

AudioTelligence, the Cambridge company dedicated to making speech clear and intelligible in a noisy world, has raised a further $8.5 million in Series A funding. 

The round was led by Octopus Ventures with participation from existing backers Cambridge Innovation Capital, Cambridge Enterprise, and CEDAR Audio. 

While the adoption of voice-activated technologies in ‘smart’ homes and workplaces is on the rise, the accuracy of modern speech recognition systems remains severely limited in noisy environments.
 
To tackle this problem, AudioTelligence’s technology acts like autofocus for sound, using data-driven ‘blind audio signal separation’ to focus on the source of interest, allowing it to be separated from interfering noises. 

This enables microphones to focus on what users are saying, improving the audio quality for listeners, regardless of background noise.

Valuable applications for AudioTelligence’s technology include voice assistants operating in noisy environments, smart speakers, smart TVs and set-top boxes where broadcast sound interferes with command recognition, and two-way telephony in noisy places.

AudioTelligence recently demonstrated this capability at the CES show in Las Vegas. Tests with a home assistant platform showed that sentence recognition rate in noisy conditions jumped from 22 per cent to 94 per cent.
The $8.5 million investment will support AudioTelligence’s ambitious plans to disrupt the $10 billion voice market by fuelling further breakthroughs, supporting new partnerships with technology providers, and tripling employee headcount over the next three years.

This latest investment round follows a total of $4m seed funding in 2018 from Cambridge Innovation Capital and Cambridge Enterprise. The company was founded in 2017 as a spin-out from University of Cambridge-founded CEDAR Audio.

Ken Roberts, CEO and founder of AudioTelligence, said: “Voice command systems work reasonably well when the audio scene is quiet, but performance deteriorates rapidly once you have multiple people talking or when there’s background music. 

“The number of applications where our technology is needed is enormous and still growing every day.

“We’ve already seen some great results from real-world testing and this investment will fund further product development to ensure we can all communicate clearly with the next generation of smart consumer devices and each other.

“Our solution doesn’t need calibrating or training and the code is production ready – which means existing devices can be easily upgraded to AudioTelligence with no more than a software update.”