Dr. Patricia Scanlon is CEO and co-founder of SoapBox Labs, the leading company focused on voice recognition technology for children. Most voice recognition solutions today are optimized for adult speakers and have high error rates when applied to children's vocal patterns which are constrained by immature biological development and language proficiency. SoapBox Labs was created to fill this gap in ASR performance for kids.

In today's interview, Scanlon discusses the EdTech market, the changing perceptions of venture capital related to the segment, new applications for speech recognition for children, and how COVID-19 has impacted the market.

Dr. Patricia Scanlon earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and then went on to complete her PhD in speech recognition with a focus on signal processing and machine learning at the University College Dublin. Those studies included research at both Columbia University and IBM. That was followed by seven years on the research staff at Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent before founding SoapBox Labs.