Sep 28, 2023
Patricia Scanlon is the founder and executive chair of Soapbox Labs, the company behind the industry's leading automated speech recognition (ASR) for children. Scanlon has a PhD in speech recognition, signal processing, and machine learning from the University College Dublin, and previously was an adjunct lecturer at Trinity College and on the research staff of Nokia Bell Labs. She founded Soapbox Labs after recognizing that all leading ASRs were trained on adult speech data and showed poor results for children, particularly young children.
Since founding Soapbox Labs in 2013, the company has helped leading software providers bring ASR to education, gaming, and other applications designed for children. We discuss many of the applications and how education has changed since COVID.
Scanlon is also Ireland's AI Ambassador and we discuss market education for consumers, business, and government, as well as the draft EU AI Act. She was previously a guest on the Voicebot podcast in episodes 129 and 206, from 2019 and 2012, respectively.