If you mention “voice technology”, most people think of Siri, Alexa or Cortana. While personal artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are becoming increasingly popular in our everyday lives, they are just one use of voice tech, and are primarily designed for adults.
Irish tech company SoapBox Labs wants that to change. The company has developed speech recognition technology designed specifically for children, and it’s already in use across a range of applications, from toys to education apps.
Children’s voices differ from that of adults. “Typically, they have a higher pitch (音高), and may use different language or speech patterns, which regular voice technology cannot always pick up on.” explains Patricia Scanlon, the founder of SoapBox. “It’s understandable that an industry that has spent decades working on technology and only focusing on adults runs into a fairly significant problem when they try to apply it to children.”
Rather than making slight changes to the available voice technology already on the market, SoapBox builds its voice engine from scratch-focusing on children aged 2 to 12. The company says it created a data set to train its AI system, made up of thousands of hours of children’s speech collected in real-world noisy environments-kitchens, classrooms and cars-from kids of all ages, accents and dialects (方言)，from a total of 192 countries.
This opens up a whole new market, for which there’s growing demand. More than 8 billion digital voice assistants are expected to be in use, and there is an increased focus on adapting the tech for children.
SoapBox, which is selling a technology rather than a product, has attracted more than 50 clients from around the world. The technology can help a child learn to read or learn a language. It acts as a helpful adult, reacting immediately to the child and giving them one-on-one time, and it can also help to record a child’s progress and provide recommendations to a teacher or parent.
【小题1】What makes SoapBox different from Siri?| A．Its use of voice tech. |
| B．Its creative use of AI. |
| C．It is designed for children. |
| D．It is used on many applications. |
| A．A lot of effort has gone into developing SoapBox. |
| B．Voice technology has much room for development. |
| C．There has been great demand for a system like SoapBox. |
| D．SoapBox understands adults’ voice better than that of children. |
| A．Recordings of 192 dialects. |
| B．Data from a previous system. |
| C．Speech from people of all ages. |
| D．Newly-collected speech of children. |
| A．Markets. | B．Suggestions. | C．Experiments. | D．Problems. |
