12 Days of Highlights from 2019
December 21, 2019
With a nod to the holiday season, the end of a hugely successful year, and the Christmas spirit that pervades Dublin right now, we’ve put together these 12 Highlights from 2019.
It wasn’t an easy task, and no matter how hard we tried, some great achievements were still left out, like our Wired UK Top 50 Hottest Companies recognition in August.
We hope you enjoy this look back, and wish you all a very happy Christmas, and a peaceful, joyful, prosperous, and purposeful New Year.
1. Microsoft partnership announced: “With the move to Azure our customers benefit from improved features, speed, and coverage in every corner of the world,” says COO Martyn Farrows.
2. Colm O’ Carroll joined the SoapBox family as CFO: “SoapBox Labs reminds me, in many ways, of Shazam – a rapidly scaling, deep tech company in the midst of a truly transformative period for kids’ technology.”
3. Lingumi partnership announced: “By integrating the SoapBox API, Lingumi can now assess and track the English speaking progress of tens of thousands of kids every day,” said CEO Patricia Scanlon.
4. Successful pilot in UK and Irish schools: “We saw the impact speech recognition can play in solving the global literacy crisis right in front of our eyes,” said Agape Deng from our Speech Tech team. Read more and download our white paper on the results of the pilot.
5. Showcase at ICASSP 2019: “We had a fantastic demo showcasing our tech working in four languages on noisy, real-world kids speech, with an accuracy that can’t be matched by any of our competitors” said Amelia Kelly, our Director of Speech Technology.
6. TEDx Talk: CEO and Founder Dr. Patricia Scanlon delivered a TEDx on “How Technology Transforms a Child’s Reading Journey” that quickly garnered over 40,000 views.
7. Niamh Bushnell appointed Chief Communications Officer: “It was my ambition to return to industry during 2019 by joining a world-class deep tech Irish company like SoapBox Labs,” Niamh explained.
8. Paper on kids’ digital rights submitted to UN in collaboration with digital anthropologist Veronica Barassi: “As perhaps the first speech tech company with privacy-by-design in our DNA we’re now asking our colleagues across the industry to join us,” said COO Martyn Farrows.
9. AI Awards Ireland: “Winning the AI Ireland Award was great recognition of our world-class innovation and hard work. I was really delighted,” said Director of Technology Robert O’ Regan.
10. FCRR partnership: The world-renowned Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University selected SoapBox Labs as part of the $30M Reach Every Reader project to assess literacy in thousands of young kids across the US.
11. CEO and Founder Dr. Patricia Scanlon wins well-deserved awards including “Digital Hero 2019” at the Spider Awards and “Trailblazer of the Year” at the Women in Tech Awards.
12. SoapBox Labs wins large funding grant to embark on a disruptive new AI project, starting in 2020 with the delivery of our voice tech as an embedded solution for smart toys.
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