Beyond Verbal raises $3 million to identify people’s moods from theirvoices
Beyond Verbal, an Israeli startup specializing in analyzing human emotion and traits based on voices, has raised $3 million in a round led by Hong Kong investment holding company KuangChi Science Ltd, with participation from Winnovation and Singulariteam. This closes the Series A round at $7 million over the past couple of years.
Founded out of Tel Aviv in 2012, but using technology based on decades of research, Beyond Verbal features emotion analytics technology that doesn’t consider the content or context of the spoken word, but instead looks for signs of anger, anxiety, arousal, and more through studying the intonation in a person’s voice. Use-cases include health assessment (establishing an individual’s mental wellbeing) and market research (identifying subjects’ true emotional state), while call centers could also use the smarts to improve relationships between operators and customers.
The company has now raised $10.8 million in total, including a $3.8 million seed round in 2014, and the latest cash injection will be used to boost its research and development in the health and wellness realm, as well as helping commercialize the product.
“This funding will enable us to enhance our world leadership position and continue our efforts into researching the connection between vocal intonation and health issues,” said Yuval Mor, CEO of Beyond Verbal.
In its few years since launching, Beyond Verbal has conducted studies with a number of high-profile organizations, including the Mayo Clinic, the University of Chicago, Scripps, and Hadassah Medical Center, and its historical data gathering has led to the collection of more than 2.5 million “emotion-tagged voices” across 40 languages.
Morpholio launches its ‘digital stencil’ drawing app fordesigners
Stencils have invaded art in a big way. And now they’re getting much easier to create, thanks to Morpholio‘s Stencil tool. Stencil will be a part of Morpholio’s existing digital drawing app, Trace App.
You can use Stencil to create your own toolkit of custom graphics that you can stamp out on your drawings. It takes any image that you can find and then transforms it into a custom template for stencil art.
“Here we witness, through art, the power of stencils delivering rigorous detail with extreme efficiency, an almost perfect optimization of craft, process and drama.” says Toru Hasegawa, Morpholio co-creator, in a statement.
Stencil also hasan array of pre-made illustrations and symbols that have been artfully created for architecture, interior, industrial, and graphic design. That makes it easier to do multilayered sketches and images.
“Creating stencils sits perfectly between the architect’s sketch and the quick photo,” said Mark Collins, co-creator at Morpholio, in a statement. “You’re trying to capture something – a texture, pattern, or detail that you want to use. Sketching is great, but slow. Taking a photo buries it in the photo album. Generating a stencil automatically creates an incredible tool that you can utilize in various ways. The stencil is the quickest path to distill an image into an actionable idea.”
If you like a real world facade or street sign, you can take a photo, set the contrast, and then transform it into a stencil that you can use repeatedly. You can use it to bring a sketch, floor plan, section drawing, or background image to life.
Stop typing on your phone. Using your voice isfaster
peech recognition software has gotten really good in the past few years. It’s so good, in fact, that you can actually dictate on your phone faster than you can type out your words.
At least one recent study suggests that. Results of the study, published on August 25, show that an iOS app that uses Baidu speech recognition software inputsthree times faster than human typing into the standard iOS keyboard. Baidu conducted the study in collaboration with researchers at the University of Washington and Stanford University.
The rise of Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and Alexa is proof that speech recognition has gotten to be very good. Yet many of us still tap the keys on our phone and tablet keyboards when we need to write texts, emails, and documents — perhaps because we think we’re faster because of dictation errors. The new study showsthat maybe it’s time to start relying more on software if we want to save time with text input.
Computers can carry outspeech-to-text dictationthree times faster than people can type.Tests were carried out in English and Mandarin Chinese, and while the computer’s conversion of speech to textwas slightly slower in Mandarin than in English, it was still three times faster than when thehumans typed it in.
The experiment pitted 32 people — ages 19 to 32 — against an experimental app that uses a Baidu program called Deep Speech 2.
Participants were asked to dictate or type with a smartphone keyboard more than 100 randomly selected phrases like “Wear a crown of many jewels” and “This person is a disaster.”
People speaking to Deep Speech 2 in English created 172 words a minute, while QWERTY keyboards and fingers made 53 words a minute. In Mandarin, people typed 38 words a minute, and with speech produced 124 words a minute.
Including all the auto-corrects and typos, the keyboard-finger combo made fewer mistakes than speech-to-computer efforts, but was also slower.
Speech is far more natural for people than typing, Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told NPR.
“Humanity was never designed to communicate by using our fingers to poke at a tiny little keyboard on a mobile phone,” he said. “Speech has always been a much more natural way for humans to communicate with each other.”
Speech recognition software has gotten really good in the past few years. It’s so good, in fact, that you can actually dictate on your phone faster than you can type out your words.
At least one recent study suggests that. Results of the study, published on August 25, show that an iOS app that uses Baidu speech recognition software inputsthree times faster than human typing into the standard iOS keyboard. Baidu conducted the study in collaboration with researchers at the University of Washington and Stanford University.
The rise of Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and Alexa is proof that speech recognition has gotten to be very good. Yet many of us still tap the keys on our phone and tablet keyboards when we need to write texts, emails, and documents — perhaps because we think we’re faster because of dictation errors. The new study showsthat maybe it’s time to start relying more on software if we want to save time with text input.
Computers can carry outspeech-to-text dictationthree times faster than people can type.Tests were carried out in English and Mandarin Chinese, and while the computer’s conversion of speech to textwas slightly slower in Mandarin than in English, it was still three times faster than when thehumans typed it in.
The experiment pitted 32 people — ages 19 to 32 — against an experimental app that uses a Baidu program called Deep Speech 2.
Participants were asked to dictate or type with a smartphone keyboard more than 100 randomly selected phrases like “Wear a crown of many jewels” and “This person is a disaster.”
People speaking to Deep Speech 2 in English created 172 words a minute, while QWERTY keyboards and fingers made 53 words a minute. In Mandarin, people typed 38 words a minute, and with speech produced 124 words a minute.
Including all the auto-corrects and typos, the keyboard-finger combo made fewer mistakes than speech-to-computer efforts, but was also slower.
Speech is far more natural for people than typing, Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng told NPR.
“Humanity was never designed to communicate by using our fingers to poke at a tiny little keyboard on a mobile phone,” he said. “Speech has always been a much more natural way for humans to communicate with each other.”
People have been promised great speech recognition for 40 years, said Stanford University computer science professor James Landay in a video accompanying the study. The study’s impressive findings are due to advances in machine learning and big data.
“The implications of this result is we should expect to put speech and a lot more of our user interfaces beyond just typing out an email or text message,” Landay said.
“We can imagine interfaces where you use speech and then you get the results and switch to a graphic interface and poke on it with a finger, or other situations in your car or your home where speech might make sense,” Landay explained. “How do we combine that with other interfaces in the future?”
VizEat, a startup that lets you dine in a local’s own home, gobbles up €3.8M funding
VizEat, a European startup that operates a “social dining platform” to enable travellers to dine in a local’s home, has raised €3.8 million in new funding. The round was led by various, mostly unnamed, investors and also includes current backer Eurovestech.
Founded in July 2014, VizEat has built a platform — or marketplace — that connects those seeking an authentic local dining experience with hosts who are willing to cook for and invite strangers into their homes. In a sense it’s similar to the early days of Airnbnb in that the social aspect is part of the draw. A cultural exchange, if you will.
That, Jean-Michel Petit, co-founder and CEO of VizEat, tells me is seeing the platform being used not only by tourists who want to sample local life and food, but also local residents in multicultural cities who have begun taking to VizEat’s “immersive food experience”.
Most of the startup’s 20 staff are located in Paris, but VizEat also has offices in Spain and Italy. It says the new funding will be used to accelerate growth, including opening local offices and recruiting country managers in the U.K. and Germany.
VizEat is also trumpeting a recent hire: former Head of Mobile Acquisition Marketing of Meetic-Match Group Europe, Pierrine Griffiths, has joined the company’s management team.
But how big is collaborative gastronomy, I didn’t actually hear you ask. VizEat says it has grown from 50 hosts to more than 20,000 across 110 countries. Its authentic dining experience now also includes cooking classes and food tours with locals.
However, Petit is candid enough to concede that VizEat has potentially benefited from “last mover advantage” and that for others, such as Cookening, a French early pioneer in the space that VizEat acquired last year, the timing probably wasn’t quite right. He believes that VizEat’s model taps into a behavioural shift that is seeing travellers seek bespoke experiences and are moving away from off-the-shelf and all-inclusive holidays.
Another aspect to VizEat’s early signs of success is that the startup is playing nice and partnering with the travel industry, including marketing the service to business travellers not just tourists. This helps to counterbalance the seasonality of tourism, ensuring that hosts can continue inviting guests to their dinner table throughout the entire year.
In a statement, Petit adds: “For many holidaymakers, a VizEat food experience with locals is often the highlight of any trip. Because travellers don’t have to radically change their travel habits to enjoy these great experiences, VizEat has partnered with a range of hospitality providers, harmoniously aligning itself with the tourism industry. This new round of funding will allow us to boost our growth plans so that we can bring our ultimate local food experiences to more people, in even more countries.”