Patricia Scanlon

Patricia Scanlon is an Irish entrepreneur. She founded SoapBox Labs in 2013, a company that applies artificial intelligence to develop voice and speech recognition applications that are specifically tuned to children’s voices. It builds language learning appliances for education like text reading and speech therapy, and modules for toys, gaming, voice control, augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, and the Internet of things. As of 2015 she is CEO of SoapBox Labs, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The startup raised $3.6 million.

Scanlon holds a PhD in digital signal processing and electronic engineering. She executed research for the Columbia university, IBM, University College Dublin, and Nokia Bell Lab in Dublin.

Speech recognition technology as used by devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home are built for adults. Children have higher pitched voices and different speech patterns. Young children don’t adapt their speech to suit machines, something adults do (un)consciously in order to improve the behaviour of voice-controlled user interfaces and so-called smart assistants. Speech recognition technology based on adult voice data models lead to bad performance when used by young children.

When Scanlon and her team started to work on this problem in 2013, they had to critically review how traditional speech technology was implemented. After extensive research, it became clear that children’s speech behaviour is much different from adults, especially for young children. Their dataset is built with 25.000 children voices. SoapBox Labs uses deep neural network-based speech recognition technology to analyse children’s speech in real-world noisy environments. This solution can be integrated with third-party applications and web services. It performs at least 10% better than traditional platforms when used by children. Scanlon foresees that devices can distinguish between child or adult speaking and switch the underlying data sets and models accordingly. It also adapts itself to a child user by interacting in a different way or by changing application permissions. In 2018 the technology was available in Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese and later in 2019 in French, German and Italian.

Soapbox Labs was awarded a 1,5 million euro grant by EU SME in 2017.

In October 2018, Scanlon was listed by Forbes as one of the top 50 Women in Tech in Europe and one of the top 50 Women in Tech worldwide

Scanlon has spoken at conferences such as Inspirefest.

• Company web site