Pioneering Developer of Voice Technology for Kids Announces U.S. Expansion and Promotions

DUBLIN, March 18, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SoapBox Labs, pioneering developer of private and accurate voice technology for kids, today announced its expansion into the United States and the promotion of three employees to its leadership team. The announcement signals momentum for the Dublin-based company, as well as growing demand for its kid-specific voice technology in the global education technology market. 

"A decade after the introduction of voice assistants like Siri and Google, brands and companies are realizing what SoapBox Labs has long known to be true: voice technology built using adult voices does not work for children," said SoapBox Labs CEO and Founder Dr. Patricia Scanlon. "In order to meet the increasing need for voice-enabled solutions that actually work in kids' play and learning, we're now scaling our diverse, committed, and world-class team—at home and abroad."

Promotions with the company include:

• Jonathan Hume is Vice President of Global EdTech Sales. Hume has spent the last 16 years in business development roles at a variety of technology companies with a particular focus on building global teams in education technology companies including Schoology, Abl, and now SoapBox Labs.
  
  
• Dr. Amelia Kelly is Vice President of Speech Technology. Dr. Kelly has more than a decade of experience in speech signal processing, natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence and holds a patent in cognitive computing. She is currently a Fulbright TechImpact Scholar. She previously worked with IBM Watson in Silicon Valley and was a research fellow at Trinity College in Dublin.
  
  
• Robert O'Regan is Vice President of Engineering. O'Regan has over 20 years development experience working with both start-up and enterprise-level companies. He previously helped co-found a start-up that developed automated trading algorithms for the online gaming industry and has worked with a number of large-scale enterprise class solutions for initiatives such as the U,S. Healthcare Reform Act.

The promotions of staff based in Ireland and the United States reflects SoapBox Labs' commitment to delivering world-class voice solutions to an ever-expanding roster of entertainment and education clients globally and is mirrored by the growth in staff numbers internally. In the last year alone, amid the global pandemic, SoapBox welcomed 10 new team members—the majority speech engineers and scientists—and continues to add new roles to the team.

The momentum and expansion of SoapBox Labs also responds to an unprecedented expansion in the education technology market. According to education research firm HolonIQ, this market is growing at a rate of 16.3 percent per annum and will have more than doubled in size by 2025, reaching $404 billion in total global expenditure.

About SoapBox Labs
SoapBox Labs is on a mission to transform play and learning experiences for kids using voice technology. Our proprietary technology is built specifically for 2-12 year old kids' voices, language and behaviors. It caters to global accents and dialects and shows no racial and socioeconomic bias. Our best-in-class accuracy has been independently verified by the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University and others.

The SoapBox voice engine has been built using a privacy-by-design approach. Protecting kids' fundamental right to voice data privacy is a cornerstone of our work and philosophy.

SoapBox Labs licences our technology to third party entertainment and education companies and partners with them to deliver world class voice-enabled kids' products to market, including literacy and English language tools, smart toys, games, apps and robots.

SOURCE SoapBox Labs

Related Links

https://www.soapboxlabs.com