INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Deepgram, a startup focused on high-quality, real-time speech recognition, announced a $12 million Series A this morning.The startup,
founded a half decade ago, according to Crunchbase data, with just a few million in raised capital, is interesting, as its success to date
was founded on two consecutive experiments
The first dealing with its technology, and the second concerning its market.Deepgram sits in the midst of our continuing conversation about
AI-grounded companies, or at least companies that make use of deep learning
headsets and trying to train Dragon Naturally Speaking to better let you dictate into Word documents
Startups like Otter.ai have taken speech recognition tooling and made it available to the masses
modern world of speech recognition.Namely, improved accuracy
Otter and other services can do a fine job gisting a sound file into words and paragraphs, even working to differentiate between speakers
With most calls that I execute for A Technology News Room, for example, I record the chat on my phone, export the audio, upload it to
Otter.ai, leave it be and circle back later on to listen and clean up the text for use in an article
Instead, Deepgram has built a speech recognition tool that it claims is more accurate, and can handle real-time text input
It sells the tech to large companies
accuracy.Its investors agree
Deepgram provides its services in two ways, hosted on its own hardware (the firm claims better margins by running its own metal, and, you
now know why Nvidia is involved), and on-prem on client hardware
Deepgram then spent another few years testing out its possible commercial appeal
It may seem obvious today that there would be demand for what Deepgram built, but Gong.io and other, similar services are only so old
Regardless, after about four years, the company was content that it had proven out its product and customer base
position, now crossed with a pile of cash
