Speechmatics’ Queen’s Award honours translation at its best

An extraordinary year has a cherry on top of the cake as Speechmatics celebrates being given a Queen’s Award for Industry this month.
The category for the win is innovation – and CEO John Milliken says it is ongoing. “It’s very exciting to win the Queen’s Award for Industry,” Mr Milliken told the Cambridge Independent. “It’s great recognition for the hard work the guys have been doing over the last few years.

“We’re continually innovating, and have further developed the automated linguist technology – the way we build languages is a key part of the value proposition.”
The AI-driven ability to integrate a new language into the platform has significantly sped up the goal of real-time translation from scratch.
“It’s a great success story, because it now takes us four to six weeks to build a language from base level to commercial availability. For instance, we did some work for a Korean company and developed the language in four weeks – with no Korean speaker in the building. Automated linguistics involves machine learning on top of machine learning. The way we build and improve languages is to learning from the training data: automated languages help with that by using machine learning.”
The training data comes from “lots of audio data” that is commonly available “so for instance YouTube, audio books, customer data – or we buy data from specialist companies”. Public, customer and specialist components combine to deliver Speechmatics’ real-time translation.
“The specialist companies are usually based internationally, often from companies doing other things, for instance language interpreters for large conferences. People tend to approach us.”

Upgrading the service is the norm.
“It’s continuous: we’ve improved the accuracy of our English translation by 20 per cent in the last 12 months. We measure up as best or second best as far as accuracy is concerned in the world – compared with Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
“In fact Google and ourselves vie for most accuracy in English but we outperform all others in other languages.It’s a great position to be in for a company with less than 100 people in Cambridge.”
Speechmatics is growing – and not just at its King’s Hedges site.
“Our offices are expanding,” says Mr Milliken. “We’ve grown from 50 at the start of 2019 to 80 now – and probably 100 by the end of the year.
“We also have an office in Brno in the Czech Republic. There’s three or four there now, and we’ll build the team out. It’s our speech and machine learning centre.
“We also have a workspace in Chennai, in India, for the engineering function. We’ll continue to focus on Cambridge but we can’t find enough talent to be able to recruit.”
A sales office in the US is also onthe cards, “probably in Denver”. Currently, around 50 per cent of sales are in the UK, and 50 per cent overseas – “of which 45 per cent is in the US, and 5 per cent in Australia and New Zealand”.
Speechmatics’ ability to comprehend languages is now so advanced “it’ll recognise words in any accent, including Indian English, Australian English, American English and more”.
You can read the original article, from the Cambridge Independent, here