Soapbox Labs secures €2.1m to fund ‘Siri for kids’
Summary
It was around this time last year that Soapbox Labs announced it had secured crucial seed funding worth €1.2m to help the company – founded by Dr Patricia Scanlon – to achieve its goal of developing speech technology specifically for young children. There, Soapbox Labs attracted investment from Elkstone; Enterprise Ireland’s High-Potential Start-up Fund; a consortium of private investors from Ireland, the US and Asia; and Astia Angels. Now, SoapBox Labs has announced a further €2.1m in funding to bring multiple languages into its children’s speech-recognition platform, which offers a cost-effective and scalable solution to help address global literacy challenges. “Globally, we’re facing a literacy challenge where children are falling behind in their reading skills at a critical age in their development, and learning new languages is becoming increasingly more important.” The company grew from Scanlon’s observations of her daughter interacting with mobile devices. She noted that apps and web services for children lacked accurate speech-recognition capabilities, particularly in noisy environments such as homes and schools, which motivated her to start developing a solution to this problem.